


An Ending (Ascent)

by Anti_kate



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Human, Angst with a Happy Ending, Crowley Whump (Good Omens), Crowley rides a motorbike, Doctor Aziraphale (Good Omens), Eventual Smut, Good AUmens, Historical 1960s, Hurt/Comfort, I am not a doctor so I apologise for all medical inaccuracies, I promise this ends well, Implied Drug Use, M/M, Not Quite a Slow Burn More Like A Medium Simmer, Period Typical Homophobia, Pining, This is a story about hope, Tortured space metaphors, erotic wound tending, small town life
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:49:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24590107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anti_kate/pseuds/Anti_kate
Summary: Somewhere in space the moon fell, and the astronauts fell, and Aziraphale fell too; felt himself spinning out of control, plummeting, and he had to pull himself out of this hopeless spiral before he was dashed to pieces against Crowley’s rocks.It’s the late 1960s. Aziraphale is a doctor, Crowley is his next door neighbour, and men are about to walk on the moon.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley, Tracy/Mary
Comments: 211
Kudos: 245
Collections: Good AUmens AU Fest





	1. Drifting

**Author's Note:**

> An enormous thank you as always to my wonderful friend and beta NarumiKaiku for your endless help and patience. Thank you also to MuseGnome and Princip1914 for assisting with my medical research, but of course all mistakes are my own (and apologies in advance for any medical errors I make). And finally, a huge shoutout to Squiddz and racketghost for the cheerleading.
> 
> The title comes from Brian Eno’s _Apollo_ album.
> 
> Content Warning: this chapter contains descriptions of physical injuries and a medical procedure (stitches), and internalised homophobia.

_“Often a star was waiting for you to notice it.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies_

**July, 1969**

Somehow he’d forgotten it was today, even though it was all over the papers and all the radio announcers spoke of. A dozen people stood outside Tyler’s, crowding around the Sony Trinitron display, and he remembered that up in the darkness, in the vast blackness beyond the Earth’s thin atmosphere, a tiny ship circled the barren moon.

Aziraphale joined the fringes of the crowd and through the thick late afternoon sunshine he could just about see the flickering, grainy images through their bobbing heads, just about hear a man’s voice droning on about modules and landers and fuel. The picture wasn’t of space but of some BBC studio somewhere, men in ties nattering on. 

The astronauts, suspended up there in their little origami spaceship, were waiting for the right moment to land. Crowley had explained it all to him, sketched it all out on his back when they’d laid in his bed. It had been incomprehensible. And it wasn’t that he was bad at numbers, you had to be good at doing maths in your head at St Thomas’s. But the way Crowley had described the Newtonian mechanics of it all made his head spin. Trajectory, velocity, acceleration, deceleration.

(Crowley’s fingers drawing circles and flight paths on the bare skin of his back, his low voice gone soft, a smile in it, instead of teeth. That’s what had made him dizzy. Not the numbers, not the idea of being in a tiny little shoebox in the sky. Just a precious human thing, skin on skin, the two of them lying there in the dark.)

Someone said his name—he couldn’t walk down the street without someone calling out _Doctor East_ , wanting to chat at him endlessly about their grandchildren—and he nodded politely. He should go before someone wanted to talk about their chilblains or arthritis. He’d spent most of the day making house calls, in and out of pensioners’ cramped little sitting rooms, and now he just wanted to go home and sit in his half-packed study with a glass of whiskey and not think for a few hours.

He couldn’t be that bloody lucky of course—Tadfield was too small, and he felt him almost before he appeared, apparition-like, at Aziraphale’s left side. His heart started up a staccato hammering and he willed himself to walk away but he didn’t, just stared at the grey images on the screens ahead. 

“Thought you were going today,” Crowley said. 

Aziraphale didn’t want to look at his face, but he risked a sideways glance. He was wearing his sunglasses, of course. Once Aziraphale thought that made him hard to read, but now he knew the line of Crowley’s mouth as well as his own face, the tilted angle of his jaw. Something simmering there, anger, disappointment. Hate? 

Crowley should hate him, he deserved it. 

“Tomorrow,” Aziraphale said, turning his attention back to the boxes in the shop window, the grainy shadow of a man holding a display of the inside of the Apollo lander. “The movers are coming tomorrow.”

“It’ll take them a while to get through all your books.” There it was, a little fanged barb. 

Aziraphale wanted to bite back, but he couldn’t. “You’re right, but I should be gone by supper time.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw a muscle flicker in Crowley’s jaw. 

Somewhere, high above, the astronauts fell endlessly, tumbling forever.

(Crowley had explained that too, that anything in orbit about the Earth was actually falling, and perpetually missing. Or falling away, too, pulling its own orbit further and further with each passage. _One day,_ he’d said, _the moon will just drift off into space, and the Earth will be alone.)_

“Yeah, right,” Crowley said, and Aziraphale—still not watching him, never watching, never endlessly staring at him as if from a long way off, as if he’d need a telescope to see him—saw a shiver pass through him, and then he moved closer, a tiny amount, as if jostled by one of the watchers. Close enough that the back of his hand brushed Aziraphale’s.

 _Don’t,_ Aziraphale thought, but he couldn’t speak, his heartbeat reduced to an insistent thrumming at the point of contact between them. Crowley’s long fingers curled and extended and his knuckles brushed Aziraphale’s, and their fingers slipped together. 

They’d only held hands when no-one could see, or underwater, furtively. Away from the rest of the world, hidden in darkness. The darkness of a bedroom, in the night at the beach. Those places might as well have been the dark side of the moon.

 _(It doesn’t have to be like this,_ Crowley had said. _We can go somewhere. Run off together. America. There’s places there we can be together._

 _Listen to yourself,_ Aziraphale had replied. _You know it’s impossible.)_

Here, now, in the afternoon sunlight, Crowley’s fingers snaked around his, and Aziraphale couldn’t bring himself to move.

“I meant everything I said,” Crowley said, his voice pitched low so that only Aziraphale could hear it. “It’s not too late, Angel.”

“Crowley—” Aziraphale said, and the fear came rushing back. Angel. That was another word for the darkness, for the space between stars. Not out here, in the street, where anyone could hear, or _see,_ what was Crowley thinking—

Somewhere in space the moon fell, and the astronauts fell, and Aziraphale fell too; felt himself spinning out of control, plummeting, and he had to pull himself out of this hopeless spiral before he was dashed to pieces against Crowley’s rocks. 

He withdrew his hand, and lurched back. “It is rather late, I’m afraid. I must finish my packing,” he heard himself say from a distance, from 238,900 miles away. “Good luck with everything, Crowley.”

And he stumbled away, into the blinding afternoon light.

* * *

**August, 1968**

He returned to Tadfield on his birthday, the day he turned 35, not that anyone knew. Only Gabriel, but he wasn’t the sort to remember birthdays, to think of gifts and cake. Especially not as Aziraphale was so thoroughly on the out-and-out. No, if anyone should provide a card and a gift and cake, it was Aziraphale. A cake of apology, of gratitude, of subservience. Gabriel would like that sort of thing, he always liked it when Aziraphale showed appropriate deference.

That was unfair, though, really, because without his brother he’d be unemployed and unemployable. 

Gabriel had picked him up in London early in the morning and drove him to Tadfield in his long white sweeping car. The radio announcer said it was going to be hot, the hottest day of the year, and Aziraphale was already sweating against the vinyl passenger seat. He vaguely worried about his suit wrinkling and stains showing under his arms, but it was too late to change now.

Gabriel’s voice droned on as the Oxfordshire countryside whipped past and Aziraphale tried to listen, to take it in. How he should consider himself lucky that his former partner in the practice had retired. Should understand Gabriel was taking a huge risk with all this, because of his standing in the town, the family’s good name. Should be on his best behaviour, toe the line, keep himself sharp.

“—the thing you have to understand about country practice, Aziraphale, is that it’s really all about managing patient expectations—” Gabriel said. 

“Hmm yes I see that,” Aziraphale agreed distantly, as the sign for Tadfield came and went again. 

“—and of course you would have been welcome to stay with us but Michael said the guest rooms really needed new wallpaper—”

“Oh yes, of course.”

Gabriel had, with typical efficiency, engineered the whole move in just a few weeks and had even chosen Aziraphale’s new home, a house only a short walk from the practice. All Aziraphale had to do was present himself for work on Monday morning, and in Gabriel’s words, “get on with it”. 

He could do that.

“—at least they didn’t revoke your license,” Gabriel was saying, as they drove down the high street.

“Indeed.”

“And this is it.” Gabriel parked the car before a row of nondescript grey terraces, their drab little front gardens ringed by low stone fences. Aziraphale thought he might recognise them from before, but he couldn’t remember ever seeing them. “Number 68!”

Aziraphale gave himself a moment before he followed Gabriel out of the car and towards the house. He could hear children’s voices, and yelling, and aggressively loud music coming from the nearby homes; somewhere, bacon was sizzling. His stomach grumbled; he hadn’t even had a cup of tea this morning, but there’d be time for that later. 

Gabriel unlocked the door to reveal a dim grey hallway, appalling floral carpet, a smell of mothballs and shut-up things left too long alone. The music seemed louder in here, as if it was amplified by the shared walls, echoing through the unfurnished rooms. 

Aziraphale trailed behind Gabriel past a reception room and into a small, dingy kitchen and then upstairs, where the air felt even more stuffy and close. A green-tiled bathroom, and two small bedrooms. Every room wallpapered with a different old-fashioned floral design, none which matched the faded, stained carpet. Unchanged for decades, done up in style from before the war even. 

“Well,” Gabriel said as they stood in the front bedroom, spreading his arms wide. “How do you like it?”

Aziraphale thought with some longing of his flat in Soho—not his anymore, though, was it—but smiled at Gabriel anyway. “Charming,” he forced himself to say. _Please don’t let there be rats._

Someone yelled nearby, and thumping noises echoed through the wall.

“The movers should be here shortly, so I’ll leave you to it,” Gabriel clapped him on the shoulder, just once, the most physical contact they’d had since boyhood, and then he was gone. Aziraphale put his suitcase down on the floor, stood for a while in the empty house, and tried to breathe. 

The impossibly loud music from next door came to an end, but started up again just a few moments later. It grew louder as Aziraphale walked back into the rear bedroom. He pushed back a musty old curtain and looked out over the long narrow back garden. Weeds battled a scrubby lawn, a dilapidated wooden fence leaned inwards on both sides, and a small shed stood at the very end. 

With a struggle, Aziraphale pulled the sash open, and the music was now even louder. 

He could see into his new neighbours’ yards, without even leaning his head out. To one side, an expanse of laundry, a tidy vegetable garden, a small black and white dog dozing in a patch of sun. On the other side, a paved patio, and a man leaning over a motorcycle.

As Aziraphale watched he stood up, straightened his back, rolled his shoulders back. He was lean and tall, hair a dark red colour, like deoxygenated blood. He wore sunglasses that obscured half his face, but Aziraphale could see the cut of his cheekbones, the angle of his jaw.

He wiped his hands with a rag, and as Aziraphale watched, took a glass from the table beside him and drank it down in one long, throat-bobbing swallow. His neck was one long arch, his hand around the glass was long-fingered, his wrists prominent, his arms thin but corded with muscle. He wore low-hipped, flared-leg blue jeans and as he bent over the motorbike again his shirt rode up to expose a crescent of skin above the denim waistband. 

A wave of self-disgust rose in him as he watched some man he’d never met, stared at him like some sort of awful voyeur, like the sort of man who hung around in parks and made a nuisance of himself. _(The sort of man who stared at other men, but never touched.)_

Still, he didn’t move, and didn’t look away as the man reached out and took a tool from a red toolbox on the ground. He moved around the machine unselfconsciously, unaware he was under observation, and brushed his too-long hair away from his face with the back of his hand.

Aziraphale knew he should open all the windows in the house, prepare himself to unpack his things. And then he should venture out, buy the papers, get some food. Walk down the high street for the first time in 20 years. Attempt some sort of normality.

Still he didn’t move.

Almost as if he felt the pressure of Aziraphale’s gaze, the man next door lifted his head up, towards his window, and Aziraphale jerked back as if burnt, and let the curtain fall. 

* * *

For the first few weeks, it went like so: he rose in the early morning and walked the few blocks to the surgery, so he could start the day without Gabriel’s scrutiny. Uriel, the nurse and secretary, was often already there, organising files or sterilizing equipment, or packing Gabriel’s bag for house calls. Aziraphale preferred to pack his own, enjoyed the routine of laying everything out across his desk and inventorying it: the vials of morphine, the digitalis—lots of heart problems in villages like these—ampules of epinephrine and glucose solution. The stethoscope, sphygmomanometer, otoscope. Sutures, needles, scissors. 

And then he would pack it away into his black bag, still new and creaking. He’d left the old one at the hospital in London and never gone back for it. 

After that, they’d spend the day visiting patients, together for the most part. 

“Just need to make sure you’ve still got the touch,” Gabriel had laughed humourlessly on the first day, and Aziraphale had smiled, nodded along. Let himself be carried along by Gabriel’s insistence that this was how things should go. 

And then he’d come home, drink one whiskey while he ate something from the freezer section of the supermarket. Allow himself the treat of some cake, for afters. 

The village seemed entirely unchanged from Aziraphale’s boyhood, from school holidays he’d spent here until he was old enough to convince their parents that he could stay at the school for most breaks. He’d escaped from the town’s gravity as soon as he could, fallen into a different orbit in London, and now he’d been sucked back. 

The town emptied out completely after 6pm, but even though it was silent in the streets his own house was never quiet: there were always feet stomping up and down stairways, always voices carrying, always a child crying somewhere. The Benny Hill theme music from Tracy and Mary’s on one side, and the sound of Crowley doing whatever Crowley did on the other. 

He’d learned Crowley’s name—and a flood of other small town gossip—from Mary and Tracy. They’d appeared on his doorstep after the movers had finished up, bearing a tin of homemade shortbread biscuits and a small jug of milk and a fresh pot of tea. They both talked endlessly, effortlessly, picked up each other’s sentences and wound them around each other. They knew who he was of course—the _other_ Dr East—and Tracy apparently remembered him as a boy, but he didn’t recall her even with her bleached-blonde hair and cats-eye glasses. 

He’d finally ushered them out again after a small eternity; it might have been an hour or less but in that time he’d learned all about the other residents of the row. Some family called the Youngs or the Smiths, who seemed to be the source of all the childish yelling. A pack of children apparently roamed the neighbourhood as they liked, posting frogs through front doors and cutting the flowers off someone’s prize begonias. 

“You have to watch them,” Mary had warned, but Tracy had laughed.

“Oh they’re just little ones having fun,” she’d said. 

And of course they’d told him about Crowley. If he had a first name, they hadn’t thought to mention it. He was simply Crowley. Crowley of the too-long hair, the too-loud music and too-fast motorcycle. Crowley who worked at the pub. 

“He’s quite handsome, isn’t he Mary?” Tracy had said archly, and Mary nodded. They shared a look. 

“He is, it’s a wonder he never has a girlfriend.”

“I suppose he’s far too busy at the pub.”

“I heard Mr Tyler’s girl was sweet on him, but he wasn’t interested, and she was the prettiest girl in the village. She moved to London, didn’t she Mary? Married someone who works in one of the banks...”

And on and on it went, the stream of gossip, the minutiae of other lives, until Aziraphale thanked them kindly for the tea and biscuits, and firmly showed them to the door. He wondered if they lived together out of convenience or as something else, and sometimes over the coming weeks he would see them together, leaning against one another in their tidy back garden, and his stomach would twist into uneasy, envious knots.

Aziraphale caught glimpses of Crowley, too, here and there, heard the rhythmic thump of his music some mornings or the throbbing of his motorcycle engine late at night.

They seemed to live opposite lives—Aziraphale waking with the early-morning sun, his days mostly a blur of arthritic old women refusing help and cranky diabetics refusing their medication. Crowley, in contrast, was a creature who existed almost entirely at night, judging from the noises from his terrace house long after Aziraphale should have been sleeping. 

Because of course he heard him then, too, the sound of his door opening and shutting, a tread up the stairs. Movement in a room that was only a few feet away, but might as well have been on the other side of the world. 

* * *

  
  


He didn’t speak to Crowley for the first time until August was almost over. 

He woke up to the sound of urgent banging somewhere nearby. He’d fallen asleep at the desk in his study, slumped over a patient file. The noise was different from the sounds he’d grown used to in this thin-walled house, and he lurched out of sleep and stumbled down the stairs in the dark. He wasn’t on call this week but it must be Gabriel, it must be an emergency—

The thumping came from the back door. Fumbling with the latch, he opened it to see a dark shape slumped in his doorway, and he could smell alcohol fumes and the sharp tang of blood, metallic and bright.

“Good lord,” he said, still muzzy with sleep. The figure took that as an invitation and leaned forward, one hand still steadying himself on the doorframe.

“You’re a doctor, aren’t you?” The figure said. 

Aziraphale reached for the light switch by the door and the room flooded with harsh overhead light—the man in the doorway blinked at him, wincing against the light. It was Crowley, his face covered in blood.

“Yes, Doctor East. What happened to you?” Aziraphale said, taking in the cut above his eyebrow—gaping and jagged—the swelling of one of his eyes, the grazes along his cheekbone.

The man’s good eye narrowed. “Tripped over in the dark. Hit my face. Think I might need stitches.”

“All right, come in, come in, sit down,” Aziraphale waved him towards the Formica-topped table against one wall and one of the two chairs beside it. Crowley walked in, favouring one side, one arm curled around his own body. It could be a broken rib, Aziraphale thought, watching the other man’s face tighten as he moved. He’d get to that after the wound on his face. “Let me just fetch my bag.”

He’d left the bag in his study, and he hurried up the stairs and back down again. When he returned Crowley was sprawled in one of the chairs, legs askew halfway across the kitchen, his head tipped back and his eyes shut. Blood had trickled down his neck, the collar of his black button-up shirt was wet with it. His hands were bloody too, and not just from the cut on his face; the skin across his knuckles was split and raw.

He looked like he’d been in a fight.

Aziraphale didn’t say that. Instead, he said, neutrally, “You tripped and fell? What did you hit your head on?”

“The ground,” Crowley replied, tersely. 

“Any vision problems or headache?”

“No.”

“Can you tell me what year it is?”

“It’s 1968, Wilson is PM, and Tommy James and The Shondells have the number one single right now.”

Probably no concussion then. 

“And your ribs?”

The man huffed, with annoyance or something else, Aziraphale couldn’t tell. “Hit them on the ground too.”

“How’s your breathing?”

“Fine.”

“All right. I’ll take a look at your face first, and then I’ll need to examine you to see if anything is broken.”

Crowley nodded, once, so Aziraphale readied a bowl of water and a cotton pad. He washed his hands in the sink before he returned to the table. He should probably send him to Gabriel since he was on call, but he was already awake now and Crowley was right here, bleeding in his kitchen. 

“I know I stink of booze, but I’m not drunk,” the man said abruptly as Aziraphale drew the other chair closer, close enough that his knee brushed against Crowley’s long thigh. “Some bastard spilled their pint on me at the pub. I don’t drink at work.”

“Of course.” Aziraphale pulled on his gloves. “This will probably sting. Hold still for me, please.” 

Aziraphale gently touched the damp cotton to his face, and Crowley hissed unhappily and flinched slightly. The laceration above his eyebrow was deep enough that it was still bleeding, and as he gently pressed the cotton pad to it he could see through the layers of the skin, past the epidermis and into the tissues below. He took Crowley’s chin in his hand and tilted his head slightly to get more light on the cut. A few inches long and likely to scar even with stitches, though Aziraphale’s hand was steady and he was a light touch with sutures.

This close he could see Crowley’s eyes were a rich, dark brown, his eyelashes long and thick. There were faint lines at the corners of his eyes, and Aziraphale realised he wasn’t as young as he’d thought; they might be of a similar age, despite Crowley’s fashionable clothes and long hair. 

“You’re right, you do need stitches,” Aziraphale said. He realised he was still holding the other man’s face cupped in his hand and let go. “I’ll give you a shot of local anaesthetic, and it won’t hurt.”

Crowley nodded. “Fine. Thank you. Doctor.” That last an afterthought, almost grudging.

Aziraphale took out the vial of lidocaine and the hypodermic, measured it out precisely, and then put a hand back on Crowley’s face to angle it back to the light again. He sank the tip of the needle into Crowley’s skin, and again he hissed through his crooked teeth. 

“That’s the worst of it,” Aziraphale said as reassurance, and the man bared those uneven teeth at him in the mockery of a smile. 

“Is it?” he said, and Aziraphale remembered his possibly broken rib.

“Perhaps not,” he admitted. “But let’s get through one thing at a time.”

While he waited for the anaesthetic to take effect, he took out the sutures, the curved needle and the needle holder. Suturing was a deceptively simple thing, really, a technique they’d practiced on chunks of pork belly at college again and again, and one he’d perfected at the hospital on God-only-knew-how-many Saturday night drunks and hysterical small children, on surgical patients and car accident survivors. 

Taking the jagged edges of flesh and stitching them back together was satisfying work, and he’d always appreciated the immediacy of it. Stitching had a beginning, and an end, and then it was done. (Not always, he knew, but he deliberately steered his thoughts from infection and reopened wounds.)

By the time he was done, everything laid out fastidiously, he thought the anesthetic would have done its job. “Tell me if you feel this,” he said, and touched one latex-tipped finger to Crowley’s forehead, not too hard, just above the ragged line of the wound. 

“It’s fine, get on with it.”

So he did. The wound called for a simple interrupted suture, a press of the curved needle though the skin—always firmer than he expected, the skin resistant to the force for a moment before it gave way under the needle’s tip—before he tied a double knot and cut the suture. He did it again and again, while Crowley sat rigid beneath his hands, nothing but their breathing breaking the midnight silence. Aziraphale’s deliberately slow and calm, Crowley’s more irregular. 

“Does it hurt?” He asked, noting the hitch in his breath as he punctured the skin.

“It’s fine.You don’t need to stop.” Again, not a no, but he continued, finished the last few stitches with the forceps, tied the last knot, sat back and looked over his work. “There you are. With any luck, it won’t leave much of a scar.”

“Don’t think luck had much to do with any of this,” Crowley muttered. Definitely not a fall, then. 

“Let’s see those ribs. Can you get your shirt off?”

The man eased himself forward slightly in his chair and then, with a pained face, fumbled at his buttons to open his shirt and reveal his thin chest, a blooming red mark down one side, between his six and ninth ribs. Aziraphale gently pressed along his ribs, and he sucked in a sharp breath.

Aziraphale couldn’t feel anything that indicated it was more than a savage contusion. No sounds as he breathed, no unnatural movement of his bones under his skin. “Any pain anywhere else?” 

“No, just where...just where I fell,” Crowley said.

He needed a good hearty meal, Aziraphale thought, aware suddenly of how thin he was, how he could feel nothing but skin and bone under his hands. “I think it’s just a bruise. You’ll be rather sore for a few days, I expect. Have you any aspirin at home?”

“Think so.”

Aziraphale looked up and saw the man’s brown gaze fixed on his face. They were close, close in a way that Aziraphale never was with anyone but patients, breathing the same air. It was one of those things he’d become used to, to touching, to moving into someone else’s proximity. It was just what a doctor did. But he was suddenly desperately aware of how close he was to the other man, in a way that felt anything but professional. 

He leaned back, putting as much space between them as he could. “And your hands?” 

“They’re all right,” Crowley said, curling them away by his sides. “Must have scraped them. When I fell.”

“Are you in danger of falling again, do you think?”

Crowley regarded him evenly. “I hope not.”

Another beat passed between them, and then Aziraphale nodded decisively, and stood to begin packing away his equipment. “If you feel dizzy, or unwell, Mr Crowley, or the pain worsens, call the surgery. And you’ll need to come in to get those stitches out in a week.”

Crowley nodded, and stood too, pulling his shirtfront closed. “You know my name?” 

“Mary and Tracy next door mentioned you.”

“Oh, yeah. Well,” he said, hovering under the harsh light, as if he wanted to say something else. 

“Cold water,” Aziraphale added. “If you soak your shirt in cold water tonight the blood should come out. Goodnight, Mr Crowley.”

“Right. Thanks again,” he said, and disappeared back out into the shadows beyond Aziraphale’s door, out into the still-warm night. A moment later he heard Crowley’s back door open and close, and the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more brief note. I know fanfic seems very inconsequential at times like this, so if you read this and enjoyed it, it would mean the world to me if you also took the time to sign [this petition for justice for Regis Porchinski-Paquet.](https://www.change.org/p/justice-for-regis-korchinski-paquet) Thank you so much. 
> 
> You can find me on Tumblr at [Antikate.](https://tumblr.com/antikate)


	2. Cosmic Echoes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Was there a flashing signal echoing through space between them, some radio broadcast from deep space? Crowley would never be quite sure, afterwards, if it was a trick of his memory, that feeling of communication between them, staticky and unclear, the words lost in a buzz and hum. A message, but not one he could decipher through the static.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I owe my life yet again to NarumiKaiku for beta-ing and helping me sort of some tricky parts of Crowley’s backstory. Thanks also to racketghost for the help with the tarot cards; any mistakes are one hundred percent my own.   
> CW: implied drug use and period-typical homophobia, brief mentions of violence.

**July, 1969**

Aziraphale unlocked his door with fumbling fingers and stepped into the darkness of the hallway. Boxes of books cluttered the narrow space. He side-stepped them to walk through to the kitchen and the cupboard housing the cut-glass tumblers and whiskey.

It  _ was _ too late. Why didn’t Crowley understand? From the beginning, it had been too late. Too late since before they were both born; too late when the Moon and the Earth formed out of swirling debris billions of years ago.

He poured more whiskey than he should, but damn it, he wasn’t on call, and he needed to calm his still-jagged breath in his chest, stop his hands from trembling so much. He pulled out a chair and sat down heavily. 

It was quiet, for once. So deeply quiet he could hear his own breath rushing in his ears. The silence wasn’t a respite; it pressed against him, a weight on his chest.

He reached for the switch on the little transistor radio that sat on the table.

“—as we speak the astronauts are putting on their space suits so they can stand on the surface of the moon—” a proper BBC radio voice crackled through the air, and Aziraphale‘s hand hovered over the switch to turn it off again, but he stopped himself. The sound was at least something beyond his own thoughts circling endlessly around themselves. 

In a few days he’d be back in London, and this would all be behind him. He would be working in a real hospital again, not driving down bumpy country roads at midnight in the pouring rain. He’d be able to go to the opera and the theatre and art galleries. Nice cafes, little restaurants. 

He could... try to meet a girl. 

He could apply himself to being a  _ good catch, _ make himself the sort of man a nice girl would want to marry; buy a house, become a pipe-smoking newspaper-reading slipper-wearing sort of decent chap. Vote for the Tories. Join the British Medical Association and some sort of club, take up golf. Vacation somewhere. Brighton. 

No, not Brighton, of course not Brighton.  _ (Crowley’s face illuminated in the lights from the pier, the water shimmering with the absurd neon colours as he leaned forward and took Aziraphale’s face in his hands and kissed him, salty-cool lips parting, hot tongue pressing into his mouth. Their bodies pressing together in the cold of the water, Crowley’s legs tangling with his, his hands circling around Crowley’s waist and running up and down along the knobs of his spine.)  _

Anywhere but Brighton.

“—of course there’s no air there at all, it’s an extremely hostile environment,” the voice from the wireless droned on as Aziraphale drank the whiskey without tasting it. “In the vacuum of space the astronauts will be dealing with both extreme heat and cold. Scientists say it will be 200 degrees Fahrenheit in the sun when Mr Armstrong walks on the moon—”

Another image came to him of a tidy little house with a rose garden out the front, a wife in a wide skirt, smiling as she offered up a plate full of aspic. He imagined children but they were blank-faced dolls, not actual human children with snotty noses, loud cries, insistent questions. He  _ tried _ to imagine kissing this imaginary wife, instead of Crowley, and his stomach roiled, disgust and alcohol swirling together. 

He might never kiss anyone again. 

“—if someone were to attempt to walk on the moon without a spacesuit, all the nitrogen in their blood would start to expand, and their body would swell to twice its normal size,” the voice on the radio said, as he stood and took his now empty tumbler to the sink. “But what really would cause death, during exposure to the vacuum of space, is hypoxia, when the human brain is starved of air... after about 15 seconds, the astronaut would completely lose consciousness—”

He reached out, turned the dial until some inoffensive music came scratching out of the speaker instead. 

He already knew his future would not contain a little house with a rose garden. No wife, no children, no sweet little domestic fantasy. 

_ (No Crowley.)  _

He already knew what the coming years held. The work would do, as it had done before. There was more than enough work for a hundred thousand men like Aziraphale; men who came home to reheated dinners and fell asleep at their desks, faces pressed into their notes. On his days off he would go alone to the opera, the theatre, art galleries. Those small things, and his work, would be enough. They would have to be enough. 

* * *

**September, 1968**

Crowley took the stitches out himself, in the mirror of the shabby staff-only loo at the pub, using a pair of tweezers and short little scissors he’d borrowed from Anathema. The gash was red and puffy a week later, his face still swollen and sore, and his side ached as he heaved the kegs up from the cellar to the bar, reached to the high shelf for one of the bottles of posh stuff. Drambuie and whiskey. Creme de menthe. The good vodka. It wasn’t as if there was much call for anything beyond that here. They served Bass and Worthingtons on tap, and some disgusting sweet sherry and Spumante “for the ladies”. Agnes thought anything fancier than that was too posh, and frowned at Anathema every time she so much as hinted that they consider things like a cocktail menu. 

It was harder to take stitches out under the bare light bulb than he’d thought it would be, and he kept fumbling until he dropped the scissors under the sink.

“What the hell are you doing, you’ve been in there for ages!” Anathema yelled through the door. 

“Taking these bloody stitches out!” He shouted back.

“Open the door!”

He unlocked it and she marched in, snatching the tweezers and scissors.

“Did you even sterilize these?” 

“I washed them under the tap.”

“My god, what’s wrong with you? Come here!”

He bent his head obligingly—although she was almost as tall as he was, in her platform espadrilles—and she snipped out a stitch, quickly and efficiently, just as she did everything else, clucking at him disapprovingly as though she was his mother and not his employee.  _ Technically _ his employee, although as Agnes’s daughter she knew more about running a pub than Crowley ever would.  Agnes had managed the pub for his father for nearly twenty years before Crowley showed up with the Last Will and Testament of Luke Crowley in one hand and nothing at all in the other. 

“Why didn’t you go back to the doctor, you idiot?” Anathema said.

“Dunno,” he said, mind turning to that night in his neighbour’s kitchen—the way his broad-palmed, blunt-fingered hands moved over his doctor’s bag, the pale hair on the back of his arms, the careful way he’d held Crowley’s face, those fingers on his jaw. “No time.”

“Don’t blame me if you get some horrible infection and half your face falls off.”

“Promise. Does it look all right?” He inspected his own face in the tiny mirror above the sink and ran a finger over the line above his eyebrow, the marks left by the stitches. He considered the bruises and the barely-healed skin, and he thought about getting on his bike and riding until he ran out of land, or maybe just going to London for a few days, finding some place to crash for cheap in Soho and a stranger to hold his jaw the way the doctor had. Gently, but firmly at the same time. 

He had thought about those hands, over and over again. On his face. On his skin. 

“You still look like you had the shit kicked out of you,” Anathema said, all pursed lips and blue eyeshadow. She wore an extravagant yellow and red kaftan that made her look like a butterfly, and it swirled around her ankles as she swished away from him in a cloud of patchouli. 

Crowley took his sunglasses from where he’d rested them on the sink and put them back on, covering up the worst of the sickly yellow and purple bruising. If he’d been in London he might have put concealer on the bruise, and foundation, and kohl around his eyes, and begged Anathema for some of that ruby red lipstick she liked so much. But he wasn’t. He was in Tadfield, where time seemed to have stopped somewhere in 1956, where old ladies whispered about his clothes and his hair. 

Mid-morning sunlight filtered into the front bar. Shadwell was the only customer, and he was always there right when they opened the doors. He ranted at Agnes as she cleaned out the lines.

“You daft old coot,” he heard her say, fond but exasperated. 

“I’m telling ya, they’re putting secret radio towers on the moon,” the man said in his thick whatever-it-was accent. Put on Scottish, Crowley thought, covering up a hint of common-as-muck Geordie. It was thinner when he was drunk, and thicker at the start of the day, and fluctuated in between. “That’s how they’re going to control us. Beam the signals right into our brains.”

“It’s a good thing you don’t have one then, isn’t it?” Agnes said, and Shadwell scoffed around his pint of ale. He sat at the bar with his pile of money steadily decreasing and drank until closing time. Crowley had made vague noises of disapproval about Shadwell’s constant presence when he’d first come to town, but they did things Agnes’s way. Because despite what the piece of paper said, it wasn’t Crowley’s pub, it was hers. He hadn’t even known about the place until the lawyers found him and told him his father had died, and congratulations, he’d inherited the only pub in a small village somewhere on the wrong side of Oxford.

He offered a few times a year to just sign the pub over to Agnes, but she always said no, that she’d buy it off him properly, next year, when she had the money. But that never seemed to happen, and so they just continued on. Crowley owned the pub but it really belonged to Agnes. She ran it, she made all the decisions, and she and Anathema lived upstairs. Crowley was the help despite what the paperwork said and despite the mountain of debts his father had left him. His father, a man he hadn’t seen since he’d been a tiny boy. His useless father, who had used the pub as collateral for betting on the dogs, and who’d let Agnes run the place while he drank himself to death.

Crowley never intended to stick around so long. He wanted, at first, just to sort out the mess, sell the pub and move on. But somehow the mess had drawn him in, and he’d never left. Tadfield wasn’t Marrakech or San Francisco or even bloody Oxford, but it had become a home of sorts. It was an easy enough place to just be. Easy enough to just get through the days and not think too much about anything. 

And if Crowley sometimes fucked off for a weekend or longer, went to London, came back sweaty and glassy-eyed and slept for three days straight, it didn’t bother Agnes or Anathema. They had an understanding, the three of them.  _ Easy. _

Except when it wasn’t. When Hastur and Ligur came looking for the money, baled him up in the alley behind the pub, and reminded him in no uncertain terms that he was on the hook for every last penny he’d borrowed to keep the place afloat. 

He could still feel the moment when Hastur’s boot had made contact with his ribs, and he put a hand on his side, remembered how the doctor’s hand had skimmed over the place where the pain still bloomed. 

* * *

As if summoned, Doctor East appeared in the pub that night. 

Thursday night, shepherd’s pie on the specials board. The two cooks, Beez and Dagon, ruled the kitchen like their own hellish fiefdom, and Crowley stayed out of it as much as he could. Ploughman’s lunch from midday until 2pm only, no exceptions. Fish and chips on Friday, roast dinner on the weekends, and on Tuesdays the worst spaghetti bolognese Crowley had ever tasted. He’d seen them put golden syrup in it, and he wasn’t much of a cook but he knew Lyle and Tate’s didn’t belong in bolognese.

He prowled around the front bar, gathering up used pint glasses in a tower, and was balancing them against his shoulder when the three of them walked in. He knew tall, dark-haired Doctor East, of course, the whole town did. Gabriel, although no-one called him that. He was a prick, Crowley thought, you could tell just by looking at him. His wife had the same look about her, smugly unhappy about setting foot in The Sword and Apple.

The other Doctor East, the new one—his doctor, Crowley thought of him now, he realised—followed them in. Apart from the night of the stitches Crowley had only seen him a few times, that white blonde hair glowing from a distance as he came in and out of his front door at odd times, his heavy tread on the stairs in the early mornings. 

The new doctor looked around with a nervous little tug on his waistcoat—a bloody  _ waistcoat,  _ even though it was probably still 80 degrees out on this late summer night—and his eyes met Crowley’s through the slight blue haze of cigarette smoke that filled the pub every evening. 

Warmth prickled along Crowley’s spine, and he could almost feel the man’s hand on him again, tilting his head back. 

Was there a flashing signal echoing through space between them, some radio broadcast from deep space? Crowley would never be quite sure, afterwards, if it was a trick of his memory, that feeling of communication between them, staticky and unclear, the words lost in a buzz and hum. A message, but not one he could decipher through the static.

He’d read in one of his magazines that part of radio static was the background hum from the Big Bang. Cosmic background radiation, they called it, and it permeated the whole universe, a thrumming note reverberating from that moment when nothing had become everything. 

The doctor looked at him, and then he smiled, as if happy to see Crowley, and a warm feeling bloomed in Crowley’s chest. The smile lit him up from the inside as if he was glowing, or maybe that was just the last rays of evening sun from outside catching in his pale hair. 

Well, fuck, Crowley thought, even as he tipped his head in acknowledgment. 

Doctor East and the wife walked past Crowley as if he wasn’t there, but the other doctor came straight for him.

“Mr Crowley,” he said, in his proper stuffy accent, the sort that had been polished up at private school. “I must have missed you at the surgery. How are you healing up?”

“Fine,” Crowley said, balancing another glass on his stack. As if compelled to confess, he added, “I took the stitches out myself.”

“It’s not exactly difficult,” the doctor said. “Though you should still come to the surgery, to make sure everything is ship shape. And your chest?”

Chrissakes, he didn’t need this in the middle of his own pub as the evening rush was starting. 

“Better,” he said, reluctantly, hating how he sounded like a bratty child. 

“Good, good. Well. I’m glad you’re on the mend. No more falls?”

“Nope, safe as houses, me.”

He opened his mouth as if to say something else, but the other doctor’s voice rang through the low chatter, as if he was calling a dog.

“Aziraphale.”

Aziraphale. What a mouthful. 

With that, the smile slipped from the doctor’s face, and his mouth pulled down with a moment of displeasure that just as quickly disappeared into a careful blankness. 

“Do feel free to pop by the surgery of course. And mind how you go.” He gave Crowley a nod, and joined the other doctor and his wife at one of the tables.

Crowley finished gathering the glasses and took them into the kitchen. He was suddenly aware of his too-long limbs, his hair falling in his face, the horrible paisley shirt he was wearing, the silver necklace he’d thrown on his morning. Tight jeans and Chelsea boots. Thought he looked all right, he had, apart from his face. Now he felt all crooked and wrong, sharp-edged and marked, not just by the bruises on his cheek and around his eyes.

Beez and Dagon glared at him briefly as he deposited the glasses, and he went back out into the pub, slipped behind the bar. 

It was busy enough, steady, and he poured beers and took money and kept one eye on the doctors. Yep, Spumante for the wife, while the two men had a pint each, which neither seemed to actually drink. 

“I heard,” Agnes said in his ear, conspiratorially, “there was some scandal at one of the hospitals in the city. That’s why he came back.”

“Who?” Crowley said, innocently as he could manage.

“The doctor. The new one. Your neighbour,” Agnes said. 

“Oh, him,” Crowley replied, vaguely. Agnes knew everything, as if she really was the psychic she claimed to be. She held tarot readings in the back room sometimes; incense burning, shawls hanging over the windows, the whole room bathed in a sultry pink light from the fringed lamp shade in the corner. 

The first week Crowley had been at the pub she’d called him into the back room, insisted he sit down on the creaking wooden chair, and then untied a silk scarf knotted around a set of cards.

“I don’t really go in for this sort of thing,” Crowley had muttered. 

She gave him a knowing look. “The cards don’t care if you go in for it or not,” she replied. “Normally I’d let you cut the deck, but your energy is dreadful, so I’m going to do it for you. Don’t need all that—” with that she waved a hand in his general direction, “getting all over my cards.”

Crowley had sat back in the chair, stuck his legs out aggressively, and smirked at her, but she’d just kept looking at him coolly as she spread the cards out before her, moved her hands over them to gather them back up, before splitting the deck into three piles. 

“This first card represents the past, the middle is the present and the last the future,” she said, and turned over the top card on the pile to her left.

Crowley, despite himself, sat up a little so he could see the card. A man, face down on the ground, his back bristling with swords, blood seeping away beneath him. “That’s cheery.”

Agnes studied it, then looked up at his face. “The Ten of Swords. Loss, and also... anger and aggression from other people.”

“Does this mean I’m going to be stabbed to death?”

“Hush—nothing of the sort. It also means that something new will be coming, that there will be completion. That you can start again.”

Crowley had looked around the dim little room, and thought of the pub beyond it and the village too, the drowsiness of it, the sheer bloody dullness of it all.  _ A new beginning. Right. _

Agnes turned over the card on the middle pile. Crowley barked out a laugh at the skeletal figure on a white horse, trampling bodies beneath. But then he thought about his old man’s heart attack in the front bar, not twenty feet from where they sat, and it wasn’t funny at all. 

“Jesus, Agnes,” he said. “This is all a bit on the nose.”

“Death means a lot of things,” Agnes said slowly, ignoring his tone. “Endings but also beginnings. Changes. It’s not always easy when things change, is it, Anthony?”

“Crowley,” he said, reflexively. “Only my mum called me Anthony.”

“Crowley. As I was saying. Death comes to us all, but without death, there’d be no possibility of new life. Death means change is coming, and you’ll just have to accept it.” She gave another one of those knowing little smiles, and then flipped over the final card. It was upside down, a woman blindfolded amongst a field of swords. 

“The eight of swords, reversed. Well then. Freedom, the cutting of the ties and misconceptions, and a fresh start,” Agnes said.

“Freedom? But she’s all tied up?” Crowley objected. Damn Agnes, but he’d been thoroughly sucked in. 

“Yes, but she could use one of those swords to free herself, any time she chooses. Cut through her own binds.”

“So then, I’m definitely not going to be hacked to bits then? You sure about that?”

Agnes had looked at him then and he’d felt known by her in some deep, unnameable way. Seen  _ through, _ as if he was made of glass.

She’d given one of her throaty laughs then, and gathered the cards back up. “I shouldn’t think so. Not in a nice quiet town like Tadfield.”

Now, five years later, he was used to being summoned into the back room to sit through a reading. He was used to Agnes’s knack of knowing things, which he’d decided was mainly because she was a good listener and a shrewd judge of character, and because drunk people like to talk. 

Tonight she was watching the two doctors eat their shepherd’s pie with that same steady, appraising stare. 

“Somebody died and it was all his fault, I heard,” she hinted, darkly. “Only come back here because Doctor East is his brother.”

Crowley touched his hand to his side again, remembered the soft warmth of a hand on his bruised skin. 

“Give him a chance, Agnes,” he said. 

“Who said I wouldn’t? Anyone’s got to be better than His Lordship.” Agnes inclined her head to where Gabriel indeed seemed to be holding court, while his wife and the other man sat in silence. “Told me I needed pills for my blood pressure last time I saw him. Well, I said to him, you try working in a pub every day for as long as I have and see how your blood pressure is.”

Crowley answered her with a hum. Agnes’s words washed over him against the backdrop of the chatter in the pub. Men playing darts in one corner. Shadwell propping up the bar, ranting to someone else about mind control beams. Anathema moving through it all, seeming somehow above it. 

It was the same as every night for the last five years.

Except for the new doctor, gazing off into the distance in between tidy bites of shepherd’s pie. 

“You’re staring, love,” Agnes said, soft now.

“M’not,” Crowley snapped back, reflexively, but he had been. He busied himself at the other end of the bar, wiping the spilled beer and emptying ashtrays. 

The doctors must have left at some point; in between pints Crowley looked up again and they were gone, their beers almost untouched. He and Agnes evicted the last of the drinkers at 11pm and then it was the routine of shutting up. Washing up, mopping, cleaning the sticky residue from tables, counting the cash out of the till and leaving the float for the next day.

After it was all done, he said good night to Agnes and went out the door. Anathema stood by the window, her dark hair outlined with light from the pub windows above. He saw the flare of light near her face and smelled the smoke at the same time. 

“Want some?” She held out the toke towards him, and he took it and inhaled the hot smoke. They passed it back and forth a few times, until Crowley felt light-headed and calm, as if he was expanding outward into everything. 

“Do you ever just want to... be anywhere but here,” Anathema said, her voice low and dreamy. 

“Yeah,” Crowley agreed. “Anywhere.”

He’d first come to Tadfield the year Anathema had finished her A-levels, and apparently the plan had been for her to work for a year and save money to enroll in teacher’s college, but she was still here, five years later. They both were.

“You should go somewhere,” he said, and watched her suck in another drag of smoke. “You shouldn’t stay here forever.”

“I should,” she agreed. “But I can’t just... leave Mum.”

“Why not?”

“She’s getting on,” Anathema said, but she sounded unsure of herself. Unusual, for Anathema. She had Agnes’s dark hair and direct gaze and unnerving way of  _ knowing _ things.

“Doesn’t mean you have to stay here forever, working in this shitty pub for not enough money.”

“Neither do you. You like all that science stuff, you could go to university too one day, I know they let older people in even if they never finished their A-levels—”

Crowley laughed at that, a humourless huff. “Fuck off. Now get inside, will you? I don’t like you hanging around here in the dark by yourself.”

Anathema’s eyes were shadows, but he felt her watching him, anyway. 

“What did they want, Crowley?”

He shrugged, trying hard not to think about Ligur holding him while Hastur used his fists. “They just don’t like me very much. Hard as it is to believe anyone can resist my charms.”

She reached out and grasped his shoulder, squeezed it once, and then walked back into the pub. He stayed to watch her lock the doors, turn out the lights.

He walked down the dark and quiet streets, a familiar route now. Past the little church, lined with rose bushes, the park with its bandstand that never seemed to be used for anything, a small playground with creaking metal swings and a deadly looking seesaw. Down another street, where the street lights were further apart and the shadows pooled thickly under shrubs and beneath cars. He couldn’t help but look behind himself as he went, listening for footfalls. 

Hastur and Ligur wouldn’t be back for a while. He’d given them as much money as he could, a few hundred pounds from the cash box—he’d had to go back and clean the blood off it the next day—as well as a few bottles of whiskey he’d had in the store room. And he’d figure out how to get the rest of the money soon. But his skin still itched as though he was being watched.

He turned onto his street, let his feet guide him to the row of unspectacular houses, all dark, their residents sleeping the blameless sleep of honest upstanding British men and women. Only one window still glowed—the doctor’s, Crowley knew, and as he walked up the short path he looked up, wondering if he’d catch sight of him. But all he saw was light on the ceiling, a few amorphous shadows, the line of a wardrobe. 

He let himself into his house, and locked the shadows outside.   
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few extra notes: thank you so much to everyone who read and commented on chapter one, and for signing the petition I linked to. I am endlessly grateful.
> 
> This week, if you have time, you may be interested in reading—and signing—[this open letter to the OTW](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSNDs1dZ_8zDZOwvR7hdH0o-N3OjUnY-AEAE4IV7fbyvcomkTFd3jkh1oBCrDGNSRV1BrX9WlHYkCjk/pub) about the organisation’s response to racism, and how Ao3 can be made a better place for people of colour.


	3. The Quality of Something Distant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley was all wrong for this domestic kitchen, he looked too bright and sharp to be standing there with his back against a Formica topped-cabinet. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: drug use, drinking and drunkenness including a brief mention of vomiting, smoking, and a brief description of oral sex.  
> Thank you a thousand times to my betas: NarumiKaiko for being awesome as always, and rfsmiley, who provided utterly invaluable help unlocking this chapter so I could finally get it written.  
> Thank you also to Squiddz and Princip14 for cheerleading.  
> And a special thank you to MuseGnome for the incredible soundtrack for this fic.

**July 1969**

He’d read somewhere that it took three days to get to the moon, three days trapped in a tiny silver box the size of a car. _And on the third day, they shall walk on another world, and their feet shall touch dust, and their lungs shall know not air, and their skin shall know not another’s touch._

Three days to the moon. _(An hour to Oxford, another two hours to London, but it might as well be three days away.)_ Three days to another world. Another world where they couldn’t touch anything, or anyone, where their every breath was precious, each inhalation carried through the black in tiny canisters. 

Aziraphale sometimes dreamt he couldn’t touch things—he would reach for the receiver on his telephone, or a hypodermic, or his stethoscope, and his hands would feel so strange and distant, as if he was wearing gloves filled with water. Reaching and grasping but never making contact. (Crowley too. He dreamt he tried to take his hand but Crowley’s fingers would slip through his grasp.)

Not that he’d dreamt in the last few weeks. He’d barely slept, lain awake long into the night, tried not to hear Crowley’s movements in the house next door. Some nights he’d crept downstairs to curl under a blanket on his settee so he didn’t have to think about how their rooms were side-by-side, didn’t have to imagine he could hear Crowley breathing in the dark. 

He was so tired. So bloody tired. He needed to pack, needed to eat, needed to do something useful, for God’s sake, but his feet drew him up the stairs, into his bedroom, towards the still unmade bed. He could lie down for a moment, even though it was barely 6 o’clock, and the sun was still high and bright. 

He sat down, pushed his shoes off with his toes. Downstairs the radio played on and he could vaguely hear the words of a familiar song floating up.

 _“I hear you singin’ in the wire, I can hear you through the whine...”_ Glen Campbell sang, distantly, tinnily. 

He should have turned it off. 

Crowley had laughed at him when he’d said he liked that song but then he bought him the record anyway, and they’d listened to it together, sitting on Crowley’s settee, Crowley’s bare feet thrown over his lap. Bickered about whether it was any good or not.

“Yeah ok the words are good but the arrangement is rubbish, angel,” Crowley had said. “Trite, sentimental, those bloody strings.”

“It’s lovely,” Aziraphale had replied, one hand on Crowley’s ankle, stroking over the bones—the prominence of his lateral malleolus at the end of fibula, the tibia, the long metatarsals. What a marvellous thing, to feel the skin above the bone, the softness of it against the solidity beneath.

“It’s so twee, it’s like drinking lukewarm tea with four sugars.”

“Oh you and your... Satin Basement and Rolling Rocks.”

“It’s Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones, thank you very much—” 

“I don’t care what you say, I think it’s wonderful. That lonely man, working alone on the wires as they hum in the wind. He’s all alone, and all he can think is of his wife at home, waiting for him—”

Crowley had slid his other foot along the inside of Aziraphale’s thigh. “Not his wife,” he’d said, and Aziraphale had looked over at him, not quite sure what he was going to say next. His voice was soft, his face gentle. 

“No? Who then?” Aziraphale asked. 

“His neighbour. Man next door. He’s thinking about him the whole time, coming home from work in the dark, and sneaking into his warm bed.”

“Is he? And his neighbour expecting him? It seems unfair that he might yearn without reciprocation.”

“He is. He’s been lying half awake all night thinking about him.” 

“He must be exhausted, the poor thing.”

“He’s not, he’s desperate. Can’t sleep for wanting that lineman’s hands on him.”

_And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time._

And then Crowley’s long limbs reshuffled themselves and he was in Aziraphale’s lap, and they had kissed for so long the record’s arm had scratched off while they worked hands under each other’s clothes, mouthed at each other’s skin. Crowley had slid one hand into his trousers, took Aziraphale in his clever fingers, and stroked him until he was gasping, until he came in Crowley’s fist. Then he’d pushed Crowley down onto the settee, urgently, and yanked his jeans down over his hips just enough to take him in his mouth, the taste of salt flooding his tongue as Crowley’s hips had bucked beneath him. He couldn’t remember if Crowley had curled his fingers in his hair, or if he’d called him angel, but he remembered his own desperation, and the taste of Crowley’s spend in his mouth, the sound of Crowley’s harsh breathing.

The memory had the quality of something distant, as if he was watching it with a telescope.

Afterwards Aziraphale had risen and put the record back on and Crowley had thrown a cushion at his head and called him a bastard. 

Aziraphale sat on the bed, tried to resist the urge to lie down, to pull the pillow over his head and muffle out the sunlight, muffle out the dying chords of the song echoing up the stairwell. 

_(Three hours to London. Three days to the moon.)_

* * *

**October 1968**

He started work sometime before dawn and drove Gabriel’s Land Rover out to a run-down farm where chickens and geese and sheep and dogs milled around in a yard littered with trash and shit. 

Inside, an old man talked to him for two hours in a kitchen that stank of mutton fat, the walls stained brown with cooking grease. He changed the dressing on his diabetic ulcers, listened to the old man go on about a neighbour’s dogs, about a feud between other neighbours. 

His wife stood in the kitchen the whole time, watching him silently. “We want the other doctor next time,” she said, abruptly, as he’d repacked the gauze and dressings into his creaking new bag. 

“I’m rather afraid it depends who’s on call,” Aziraphale said, and she frowned at him. “Luck of the draw.”

“Well,” she said, sourly, “I don’t see why we should be getting second-rate doctors out here, just because we’re in the country.”

Aziraphale snapped his bag closed, bile rising in his throat. “I’ll mention that to Doctor East,” he said, helpless to come to his own defence. Second rate. That sounded about right. And gossip travelled quickly in a place like Tadfield, he knew that, and of course word would get out eventually. 

He still felt dazed by it, knowing that everyone in the village must know by now. 

He sat in the Land Rover for a few minutes after he left the house, watching raindrops slide down the windscreen.

His second case was down another series of muddy country lanes. He stopped several times to check his map, and it still took him multiple wrong turns until he found the house. A boy with chickenpox lay sweaty and scratchy in a narrow iron-framed bed. Calamine lotion for the itching and aspirin for the fever. He left with a jar of home-made jam, pressed into his hand by the boy’s mother.

The rain thickened into great plummeting sheets some time after lunch. He drove so slowly through the noonday darkness that he was two hours late to his third patient, an older woman with a heart arrhythmia. A fourth, an old man who lived alone, a cough hacking in his lungs. The stridor of emphysema. He needed tests in the city. Aziraphale doubted he would ever get those tests, could tell by the stubborn set of his jaw that the old man would dig in his heels and die before setting foot in a modern hospital. 

Finally, he drove back to town in the gathering dusk, damp through from dashing in and out of houses, hands white-knuckled from the cold, jaw clenched against his chattering teeth. The rain had stopped sometime during his last call. A cold wind blew across the fields, clearing the clouds from the sky and revealing the last stains of sunset across the vastness of it. 

Night had closed in completely by the time he made it back to his house. (Was it his yet? It still felt like a stranger’s home, even though those were his books in every room, his sheets on the bed, his dishes in the sink.)

He showered until the water abruptly turned cool, put his housecoat on over a pair of older trousers and a faded blue shirt. He made himself tea and cooked some soft-eggs for dinner, ate them with toast soldiers at his little table, at a place set for one. The night promised a small mountain of paperwork, so he went to his desk with another cup of tea and worked on his notes until his eyes felt heavy in his head and his hand-writing edged perilously close to illegibility. 

Some time around midnight Crowley’s door slammed and opened and slammed again, and voices echoed, and then the music started up. 

He’d become used to the way the paper-thin walls seemed to carry every sound this way—Mary and Tracy’s laughter, the Young’s two children screaming, Crowley’s late night arrivals. But this was much louder than usual.

He sat under the circle of light from his lamp and tried not to hear the voices or the music, tried not to imagine the scene next door, tried not to think about who they were and what they were doing. Something hot and dense boiled under his breastbone. He should go next door, rap on the door, politely request that they turn the music down. Some of us have an early start tomorrow, he could say. 

That was a lie; tomorrow was his day off. He’d return the Land Rover to Gabriel’s, sit through an interminable dinner with Gabriel and Michael, come home to more paperwork, or a book if he got the time.

A shriek of laughter cut through the air, a woman’s voice. The music grew louder, some heavy thumping bass through the wall. He checked his pocket-watch; it was somehow almost midnight. 

He tried to concentrate on his notes, and all he could hear was the insistent thumping and voices from next door.

He couldn’t work like this. 

He rose and went down the stairs, out the front door, propelled himself across the tiny brick fence that demarcated his shabby front yard from Crowley’s rather nicer one, with its well-tended borders and tidy patch of lawn. Before he could think of it, he raised his fist to knock on the door. There was no answer; light spilled out onto the paving stones at his feet. He knocked again, louder this time, but the door remained resolutely unanswered, even as he could hear the music so very clearly he could even make out the words _(let me take you down, ‘cause I’m going to Strawberry fields...)._

The wind was bloody cold and he made a decision; opened the door and stepped into the hallway. It was a mirror image of his own, except without the hideous floral wallpaper. He followed the music into the sitting room. The room shimmered under a smoky haze in the low lamplight. This too was just like his own; except where his was done in a style that looked as though they’d been put in when Churchill was first PM, Crowley’s boasted some garish orange wallpaper, a wood-panelled record player. Perhaps a dozen people filled the room, various bodies arranged across a low settee that ran along the wall, and on the floor too, drinking and smoking and talking over the music that thumped out of a large wooden stereo. A low, sweet scent hung in the room, one Aziraphale couldn’t quite place, but it reminded him of Soho on a Saturday evening in summer. 

None of the bodies in the room belonged to his neighbour, and he hovered helplessly in the doorway for a moment, before turning towards the kitchen. 

This too was his own house but different; white where his was green, a low chrome and Formica table sitting where his own sat just a few feet away. 

A young woman intercepted him as he stepped into the room. She seemed familiar, with her bright turquoise eyeshadow and the matching blue and greens of her blouse, but he’d seen so many people the fast few weeks he couldn’t place her. 

“Oh, hello!” She cast her eyes up and down as though measuring him up. 

“Ah—” he said, “I’m looking for Mr Crowley?”

“Crowley!” she said, laughing, and he saw him then, sprawled against the kitchen cabinetry, cigarette dangling from one long hand, some luridly coloured drink in the other, talking to some other people, people Aziraphale barely registered. Crowley was all wrong for this domestic kitchen, he looked too bright and sharp to be standing there with his back against a Formica topped-cabinet. 

“Crowley!” the young woman said again—did he not have a first name?—and Crowley looked up. 

At that moment Aziraphale regretted his decision to barge in, to intrude; regretted his stuffy old housecoat and his boring trousers and faded old shirt. Regretted that he found the music too loud. Regretted himself and his own insufficiency.

Crowley waved with the hand that held the cigarette and pushed himself towards Aziraphale. “Doctor! Anathema, it’s the doctor! Get the good man a drink!” 

“Actually—” Aziraphale began, but the young woman was at his elbow again and she held out a martini glass filled with more too-bright liquid. He was going to politely demur, but somehow he lifted the glass to his lips instead.

“Oh you live next door, don’t you?” the woman said. “Are we being too loud?”

Aziraphale’s courage foundered. “The sound does rather carry,” he said, and immediately regretted it; they _were_ being far too loud, it was ridiculous, he was perfectly within his rights to insist, and yet instead he was prevaricating. “But you’re obviously having a lovely party and I should go—”

“Anathema,” Crowley was very close now, leaning into the wall beside where Aziraphale stood. “Be a love and ask Eric to turn it down, would you?”

“Only if I can put on that Engelbert Humperdinck LP I got you for Christmas,” she said.

“Threw it out,” Crowley replied, and they both laughed, familiar and warm. Perhaps they were an item. 

Anathema fluttered away, swaying to the music like a butterfly or some sort of exotic bird. They suited each other. They both seemed somehow more real than everything around them.

“Cheers,” Crowley added, and lifted his drink up, and Aziraphale was forced to drink again, as well. 

“I’m terribly sorry to intrude,” Aziraphale said after he’d swallowed.

“Are you?” Crowley took a drag of his cigarette. “Well you’re here now, have a drink, relax.”

The people who’d been chatting with Crowley went past, and they were alone in the kitchen. Silence stretched between them, and Aziraphale fidgeted with the drink in his hands. He tried not to notice how Crowley’s black and red palsy shirt was unbuttoned to his sternum.

“Do you like it?” Crowley asked abruptly, and it took Aziraphale a moment to understand he was talking about the drink.

“Very nice,” he said, diplomatically. 

“Anathema’s brilliant at cocktails.” The man took a drag of his cigarette, then held it in Aziraphale’s direction. He realised at the moment that it wasn’t a cigarette at all, and what that smell was in the air. A joint. Marijuana. Of course he knew that’s what people did at parties these days. He was a doctor, he’d seen all sorts of people in various states at the hospital. 

“Oh no, I’d better not,” he said, politely as he could, and Crowley grinned at him.

“Not a smoker then?”

“Not of marijuana.” He was aware even before the words came out that he must sound unbearably prim and prissy, but Crowley just smiled at him again. His pupils were huge and black.

“Got cigarettes here somewhere.”

“Don’t bother yourself on my account.”

“S’fine, not a bother,” he said, and wound off towards the other side of the kitchen.

Aziraphale should go home and finish his notes so he could go to sleep, and spend his weekend doing something other than working. A little reading, perhaps running the Hoover around his house, going to the shops. All the things a solitary man needed to do. 

He didn’t move, instead watched as Crowley rifled through a drawer, found something, came back. He watched as Crowley extended a gold packet of Benson and Hedges, watched as he tapped a cigarette half out of the packet before holding it up for Aziraphale to take. Watched as he produced a box of matches from somewhere and struck one alight, leaned in and held it up, the light flaring over his fingers. 

Aziraphale leaned closer and without thinking cupped a hand around Crowley’s so he could light the cigarette against the match-flame, drawing the smoke into his lungs. A moment of casual contact, that was all it was, and any unsteadiness Aziraphale felt was the rush of the nicotine. 

Crowley moved back, extinguishing the match with a flick of his wrist. 

This close Aziraphale could see his face clearly, and he couldn’t help but evaluate how it had healed. It must have been six weeks since that night he’d come to his door that night and the bruises were gone, leaving only the red slash of the scar above his eyebrow. Still swollen, but healing well by the look of it.

So it had been five weeks since Aziraphale had seen him at the pub. Five weeks of not thinking about footsteps on the stairs, not hearing a motorbike in the night, not noticing comings and goings. Five weeks of not being _completely bloody inappropriate._

“How are your ribs?” he asked. Crowley pressed a hand against his own side and Aziraphale’s eyes were drawn to the way the satiny material of his shirt moved under his own fingers. 

“Perfect. Fine. Never better,” he said. “How’s the doctoring?”

“Oh, you know,” Aziraphale said. The drink was beginning to fizz through him now. What could he say about going from house to house in the driving rain, losing his way down country lanes, the awful moment where the woman had looked right through him and _known_ that he was a dreadful fraud. (What could he say about a silent room in a hospital, about a woman’s face crumpling as he delivered the news, about handing his resignation in, about the weeks he spent sitting in his room rereading TS Eliot and Emily Dickinson, barely moving. _We are the hollow men_ and _lonely men in shirtsleeves, leaning out of windows_ and _hope is a thing with feathers_ and _forever is composed of nows.)_

“I don’t actually, that’s why I asked,” Crowley said, and it wasn’t malicious, exactly, just a little bit sharp, and Aziraphale found he rather liked that sharpness. 

“Today I had patients with heart problems and diabetic ulcers, and small children with chickenpox. I got rather lost and spent an hour circling around the same flock of sheep.”

Crowley nodded. “Sheep, lots of sheep round here. Bit of a risk of the countryside, all the sheep.”

“Well I suppose so. They do rather insist on milling across the road at the most inconvenient moments.” Aziraphale drank some more of whatever it was, strong and sweet and syrupy. “And the pub?” He was so bad at this provincial small talk, but then he’d been just as bad at small talk in the city too. Just awkward in different rooms, with different people. 

Crowley grinned, all sharp-teeth and angles. “Full of sheep, just a different sort,” he said. “Drunk sheep.”

“Do they _baa_ at you when they want a drink?”

“Might as well do for all the sense you get out of them.” Crowley took another drag of his joint and angled his body, moving closer once more, slipping himself into Aziraphale’s space as though it was nothing. “At least it makes a change from talking about the bloody weather. You think nothing was happening in the world except that sometimes it’s sunny and sometimes it’s not. Not like there’s wars going on and people being assassinated and protests...” he waved his hand again, an arc across the world. “Do you know next week they’re launching their first crewed mission since that fire last year?”

Aziraphale wasn’t sure exactly what they were talking about, but he nodded anyway; made some sort of small polite noise, which Crowley seemed to take as permission to keep talking. “Out there, humans are doing the most amazing thing anyone has ever done, and no-one here gives a shit, they just care about their bloody begonias and peeking through the curtains and staring—”

Aziraphale felt his own face warm, thought of the way he’d looked from his own window and observed Crowley’s coming and goings. His skin prickled and the aftertaste of the drink in his mouth seemed almost sickly. 

“And meanwhile,” Crowley swayed in closer again. “If Apollo 7 works out _they’re_ planning to go around the moon in December. Orbit it. They’re going to send three men up the furthest any human has ever gone from earth. They’ll see the other side of the moon, with their own eyes. It’s amazing. It’s the fucking pinnacle of human achievement...“ He was too close, far too close, Aziraphale could have counted every freckle on his cheekbones if he’d wanted to, and Aziraphale stood pinned against the cabinet.

“I...I don’t know about that,” he replied, his voice higher and far more peevish than he’d intended, but Crowley was watching him, and he kept going. “The polio vaccine, I would argue, has had far more impact on the day-to-day life of the vast majority of humankind than any of these… little jaunts into space.”

Crowley’s mouth opened slightly, and then he gave the barest hint of a smile. “The polio vaccine?” he repeated.

“Any vaccine really—polio and smallpox have of course been the most successful, and antibiotics too, if we’re talking about alleviating human misery—”

“I was talking about grand human achievement,” Crowley interrupted. “Not alleviating misery.”

“Alleviating misery _is_ a grand human achievement. Frankly I wouldn’t trade my indoor plumbing for a single rocketship,” Aziraphale continued, glad for the words piling up in the air between them. “And I rather think that spending billions of dollars to send tin cans into space is extravagantly neglectful of the fact that some half the world’s population does not in fact have indoor plumbing.”

“So you think we should cancel the space race and build lavatories instead?” 

“Surely a family living in the slums of Calcutta would find a lavatory more useful than a jet engine.”

“That’s a…a… useless comparison, because you can do both things at once.” Crowley sucked in another curl of smoke from the joint with a tilt of his jaw, revealing the long tendons of his neck. “The space race isn’t taking toilets away from the impoverished masses—”

“Arguably one could argue that it does represent a misallocation of both priorities and resources—”

“You might as well have asked Michaelangelo to refuse to paint the roof of the Sistine Chapel and give the money to the poor instead.”

“The artistic merit of something like the Sistine chapel is rather unassailable. But let’s say I accepted your terms. I rather think an artist like Shakespeare had vastly more merit and demonstrated a far greater level of human achievement than some ridiculous contest of the wills between the United States and Russia.”

“Ridiculous?” Crowley’s voice sounded affronted but he was smiling again, more broadly now. 

“The space race is first and foremost an exercise in dominance, and you cannot compare geopolitical strategizing to great works of art and literature.” Aziraphale felt rather proud of that, even though he was fairly sure he’d read both the phrases geopolitical strategizing and exercise in dominance in the newspaper this week and had simply lifted them wholesale.

“Sure, sure.” Crowley finally leaned back, putting a few inches of blessed air between them. “I’m not going to deny that politics is wrapped up in the whole thing, but Shakespeare was writing to get bums on seats at the Globe, so it’s not as if he was just sitting around being a genius for the purity of it all either. Nothing people do is pure. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad either.”

Aziraphale shouldn’t be surprised that Crowley even knew what the Globe was, and that he was able to throw in references to the Sistine chapel, and yet... he didn’t seem the sort. Too flash, too sharp. 

He rather reminded Aziraphale of the boys at school who’d always lurked in the hallways, who’d smoked cigarettes in the broom cupboards, who’d smirked and rolled their eyes at the teachers. The ones who’d always seemed ready to say something cutting, who’d snuck out the dormitories on Friday nights, who’d come back smelling of booze and talking about girls who let them touch their breasts under their blouses. The ones who always seemed to find other boys—boys like Aziraphale—to write their essays for them.

No, that was unfair. Crowley wasn’t like that, he knew already that he wasn’t like Gabriel and his friends had been at school. Gabriel had once forbidden him from speaking to anyone at all, including the teachers, and he’d been too terrified to disobey, even as he’d been forced to sit in the Headmaster’s office for hours on end, even as he’d had the cane applied to the back of his thighs.

“I must disagree with you yet again, dear boy—” At that Crowley gave him another one of those half-surprised, half-amused looks, “—there are many things people do that are pure. A child’s love for its mother, _romantic_ love, the love that seemingly all people have for music and art even if they’re not Shakespeare… it’s not as though Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights to _make money,_ she did it for the sheer love of the words!”

“You’re just proving my point,” Crowley said, pointing one long finger in Aziraphale’s direction. 

“Am I?”

“Yes! People do things for love. And money. And geo-polly-whatsit strategizing. It doesn’t change the nature of the achievement. It’s still people doing something wonderful. All the scientists and the engineers and the physicists and the astronauts, they’re doing it for all those reasons too, just like Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Brontë—”

“Crowley!” It was the young woman again, beads and jewelry jangling as she came back into the kitchen. “It’s Eric—he’s been sick in the loo and I think he might have passed out.”

“Fuck,” Crowley said, and launched himself away from the counter. “Fucking Eric.”

“Perhaps I can help?” Aziraphale said. “He may need medical attention.”

Crowley nodded, so Aziraphale followed him and Anathema up the stairs. The smell of vomit hit him at the bathroom door, and he saw a dark-haired man slumped on the floor.

“What did you say his name was, again?” Aziraphale asked, kneeling on the tiles—green, just the same as his, except his bathroom wasn’t covered in vomit. 

“Eric,” Crowley replied. “Is he all right?”

“Just give me a moment.”

Aziraphale put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Eric, can you hear me?” 

The man gave a groan and mumbled something that might have been “fuck off”, and flung an arm over his face.

“Eric, we need to know if you fell,” Aziraphale said, and the man groaned again, but he didn’t make any move to stop Aziraphale from pulling his arm away. He couldn’t see any sign of injury, and he carefully cradled the man’s head in his hands, turned it gently this way and that to make sure there was no visible injury. 

“Jus’ wanna lie down, have a kip,” the man slurred, batting ineffectually at Aziraphale’s arm. 

“I don’t think he’s hit his head,” Aziraphale said. “But perhaps we can move him somewhere more comfortable than the bathroom floor?”

“Right,” Crowley said, and between the two of them they managed to half-urge and half-lift the man to his feet. “This way.”

They manhandled him down the corridor and into a dimly-lit bedroom, and somehow, even though he had acquired the vast mass of all drunken people, managed to roll him onto the bed. 

Aziraphale stepped back and watched as Crowley pulled the man’s shoes off. He was surprisingly gentle about it, and tucked his legs up onto the bed carefully. 

“He needs to be on his side, and someone should stay with him to keep an eye on his breathing and make sure he doesn’t aspirate his own vomit,” Aziraphale said. 

Crowley looked up at him over his shoulder. “‘Course, right. Bloody hell Eric, you’ve made a right mess of yourself. And I won’t be impressed if you’re sick on my bed.”

Of course this was his bedroom, Aziraphale should have realised. A bed covered a crimson bedspread, a low table stacked with magazines, a dresser. A painting on the wall, luminous circles against a pitch-black background (a Kandinsky print, he would find out, later).

“I can stay with him,” Anathema said from the doorway. “You clean up the bathroom. I’ve unclogged the pub lavs three times this week.”

Crowley gave a heaving sigh and then stood up. “Christ... let me just… get rid of the rest of them.”

“I should go,” Aziraphale said, hovering now, his usefulness ended. “I am sure you have it all under control. But of course I’m just next door if you need me.”

What a stupid thing to say, as if Crowley didn’t know he was right there, as if Crowley hadn’t already shown up on his doorstep in the darkness, bleeding and bruised. He was glad of the excuse to leave, really, to go back to his room and his notes and his favourite fountain pen. And perhaps if everyone left they’d be quiet after all. 

The prospect seemed less appealing than it had earlier in the evening.

“Right yeah, I’ll show you out,” Crowley said, and they were in the hallway, back down the stairs. “Bit of a mess, that. Eric’s never been able to hold his booze.”

A moment later they were at the front door, and Crowley opened it for him and then stood aside so he could step through.

“Well, I’m sure your girlfriend will keep an eye on him.” Aziraphale turned in the doorway.

“My what?” Crowley said, incredulous, and something inside Aziraphale lurched. “Anathema? She’s not my girlfriend. Bloody hell, it’s a good thing she’s not here right now, she’d probably knock some of your teeth out.”

“I’m terribly sorry, I just assumed—” 

Crowley laughed, not unkindly, and the jolt went through Aziraphale’s body again, as it had when their hands had touched before. “No, even if she wasn’t actually a child, she’s not my sort at all, and I’m definitely not hers. But yeah, she’ll take care of Eric. She’s a good egg,” he said, impervious to Aziraphale’s tilting axis, to his internal motion. “All right then. I better evict the rest of these bastards. Good night, Doctor.”

The door shut, and he was gone.

 _God help me,_ Aziraphale thought, looking up into the vast depths of the sky. There came no response. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The songs in this chapter are Glen Campbell’s _Wichita Lineman,_ which I happen to agree with both Aziraphale and Crowley about. The words are great but Campbell’s arrangement is syrupy. The Johnny Cash version is peak pining. The other song is of course The Beatles’ _Strawberry Fields._
> 
> The artwork above Crowley’s bed is [Several Circles](https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/1992) by Wassily Kandinsky. 
> 
> The Apollo 7 mission was the first manned spaceflight after three crew members were killed in a cabin fire during rehearsals for the Apollo 1 mission in 1967. 


	4. Laws of Motion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Viper was the closest he ever got to outrunning himself; watching the speedometer twitch over 80, there were moments when he didn’t seem to be there at all. He was just the sound of the wheels on the road and the engine rumbling and the hedges whipping past. The world became nothing but blur and sensation and speed. Motion, velocity, instinct. He imagined sometimes if he went fast enough he might, like Newton’s cannonball, miss the Earth completely. But gravity always won.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I owe the existence of this chapter to dear friend and beta extraordinaire NarumiKaiko, and to Princip1914 for helping me with the details in the key scene in this chapter. Thank you also the best beans in the world. You are all wonderful.
> 
> Also, I am dreadfully behind at replying to comments but I want you to know that I treasure every single one. Thank you all so much.
> 
> CW: This chapter contains a lengthy but non-graphic scene depicting childbirth. There's also internalised homophobia and some mild language that may bother some readers.

**July 1969**

He had to keep moving. He propelled himself out of the bedroom, down the hallway, into his study. He had to keep moving and he couldn’t stop, because if he stopped he’d never be able to start again. He’d lie down again and never get up. 

_This is just bodies. Everything’s just bodies,_ Crowley had whispered, in the dark, after the first time they’d touched each other. 

_Of course we’re bodies,_ he’d replied, breath still catching in his throat, nerve-endings still sparking, his heart still beating wildly in his chest. _We’re humans, we have bodies._

_No. Not like that. I mean… it’s just what the universe is, it’s not these stupid made up human rights and wrongs, it’s… basic forces. The laws of nature. Like momentum and inertia. Like gravity. Like motion. You know. A body at rest only moves if something acts upon it, a body in motion only stops if something else gets in its way. Newton’s apple._

One long-fingered hand slowly moved along Aziraphale’s hip, down his thigh, then back up again. A lover’s touch, unexpectedly affectionate and gentle. He hadn’t known what to expect at all, but it was definitely not Crowley’s long body slotted behind his so neatly, and his arms wound around his stomach so gently, his breath so warm against his skin. 

_Are you the body in rest or in motion?_ Aziraphale had asked. _Or are you the force acting on it?_

_Dunno. Gets bloody complex when everything’s moving and being pulled this way and that by gravity and momentum. I’m just saying we’re all just atoms._

_I must have been sick the day we took Newton’s laws of homosexuality during O-levels,_ Aziraphale had replied, trying to make a joke of it. 

He’d felt Crowley’s mouth curve into a smile against his shoulder. _Pity, it was a good class._

Alone in his own flat, Aziraphale deliberately set those memories aside. He had to keep moving, finish packing, get to London. He had to get away. 

In the study, he began lifting books, a carriage clock, a painting from the wall of some bucolic rural scene, into one of the empty boxes. He paused at a porcelain cherub his mother had given him, a few months before she died. Her last Christmas gift to him. He’d been twelve years old and horrified by it, but then she always knew him in a way no-one else had. “It looks like you,” she’d said, and he supposed it had, with its pale hair and soft mouth. He’d taken it back to boarding school but kept it hidden in with his socks. He’d already got a reputation of something of swot, something of a crybaby, something of a _girl._

As he carefully wrapped the cherub he remembered that was the year he got a rugby ball from his father, which he felt equally horrified by. 

Gabriel sniggered and made little jabs about Aziraphale’s lack of ability on the field, until Aziraphale stormed upstairs and read books alone until his father ordered him to come down for Christmas dinner. His mother served roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and his father served a lecture about trying harder and fitting in and respecting the family name, and how the East boys played rugby because that’s what they did, and Gabriel smirked, and Aziraphale sat there with his face red and tears in his eyes. And later, when the house was dark and his father retired to his study and Gabriel gave up tormenting him for the day in favour of listening to _Dick Barton, Special Agent_ on the wireless, his mother gave him one of those chocolate oranges he liked so much. He ate it alone in his room, the cherub smiling beatifically at him from his bookshelf, where he set it between his prized copies of _The Little Prince_ and _The Hobbit._

He gave the ball to a boy at school when they went back after the holidays, one of those golden-haired sporty boys Aziraphale had always envied. Long blonde hair fell in his eyes when he ran, and there was talk he might play at premiership league level. 

Except envy wasn’t quite the right word. When he thought about other boys playing football, boys in crickets whites, boys on the rowing team; thought about their long legs and tanned arms and the soft-looking hair on the back of their necks, he didn’t simply want to be them. When he thought about their bodies in motion and how easy they made it look to move through the world, it was one part jealousy and two parts desire. 

He’d stopped again, lost momentum, found himself staring down into a half-packed box, a leather-bound Wilde first edition clutched in one hand. Ridiculous. He was always so ridiculous. _(How can someone as clever as you be so stupid,_ Crowley had said, later.)

Downstairs, someone hammered on the door. He started, felt his own heart echo the sound against his ribs as if it wanted to beat its way to freedom. How could it be anyone but Crowley? And didn’t he know how much harder he was making this? Why couldn’t he stay away? Why couldn’t he stop pushing? _(A body at rest remains at rest until acted upon by an external force.)_

The knocking continued, and a flare of anger drove him down the stairs. How could he say no again, he couldn’t but he had to—

He threw open the door, words already lining up to tumble off his tongue— _stop this we can’t it’s done it’s over please don’t make this any harder (I’m sorry I didn’t mean it yes come back please)_ _—_ but it wasn’t Crowley. 

Instead the neighbour boy, Adam, stood on his doorstep, his little gang lined up behind him. They all wore boxy home-made things on their heads that seemed to have been constructed out of tinfoil and cardboard boxes and the cellophane that came wrapped around flowers at the supermarket. It took Aziraphale a moment to realize they were dressed as astronauts. 

He stared at them and they stared back. 

Most of them had come through the practice in the past year; the girl to have her tonsils removed, one of the other boys when he’d fallen out of a tree and broken his arm. He vividly remembered their faces and their injuries and illnesses, could recall the way the boy’s arm looked before he’d set the bone and the girl’s swollen and abscessed throat, but he forgot their names in between visits. He’d tried to master the “coin behind the ear” trick as a diversionary amusement, but he fumbled it every time. In the end he’d just set an old jam jar full of boiled sweets on his desk; hoped the vibrant globes of artificial yellows and greens and blues were distraction enough from jabs and stitches.

“Hello Doctor East,” Adam said, voice muffled by his makeshift headgear. “We’re all going to Mrs Potts’ house to watch the moon landings, because Dad says their TV gets better reception than ours, and Mum made pigs in a blanket, and they say I can stay up as long as I like.”

“And my mum’s made scotch eggs,” one of the others piped up. 

“Ah,” Aziraphale said. “Very nice. I do like a scotch egg.” His voice sounded thick and strange to his own ears, and he put a hand on the doorframe to steady himself. He realised he was still holding the Wilde to his chest like a shield.

“Yeah and Pepper’s mum said we could have apple Tango too! Anyway Mrs Potts said I had to ask you to come over too. And Mr Crowley too.” The boy’s face glowed orange under the cellophane. “But he’s at the pub I reckon, ‘cause we knocked on his door but he didn’t answer.”

Crowley had some sort of knack for children; they thronged to him and hovered in his backyard when he’d been working on his motorbike. He’d even taken them on joyrides once or twice until Mr Young had appeared and glowered. Crowley seemed to know how to speak to them as if they were adults, and they all seemed to find it thrilling.

“I suppose he must be,” Aziraphale replied, carefully. “He usually is, of an evening.”

“Maybe you could ring him!” One of the others piped up. Brian or Barry or Bobby.

“Yeah he knows everything about space stuff, and he’s got all those brilliant books,” Adam continued. “Do you think you could ring him at the pub? Ask him if he can come over for a bit? He knows all about it, I bet he even knows more than anyone on the telly.”

Aziraphale tried to smile, but he was quite sure it looked like a grimace instead, a ghastly imitation of a sincere expression. “No, I rather think not. Terribly sorry. I’m not… I can’t. He wouldn’t want... that.” 

Adam stared at him beneath the cellophane. “Yeah but you’re mates, my mum says you’re thick as thieves.”

 _Thick as thieves._

“Mr Crowley is no doubt very busy at the pub. And I… I am rather busy as well. But please thank Mrs Potts for the invitation.”

There was another too-long silence as the children regarded Aziraphale curiously, as if he was some sort of alien creature.

Their ringleader gave a shrug. “Race you to the end of the street, last one there’s a rotten egg,” he said. Aziraphale apparently forgotten, the four of them bolted off down into the street, their ridiculous helmets jiggling precariously on their heads, the arcs of their motion carrying them away into sunlight.

Aziraphale retreated back into his house, and after the brightness outside the dim interior was dark, dim, unwelcoming. There was still so much to do before the movers came, and he had to keep moving, but instead he let his head drop to painted wood of the shut door. There’d be no third return from Crowley, there’d be no third chance, and it was for the best, because _Gabriel knew._ The only choice Aziraphale had was to do what he’d done, and live with what came after. 

* * *

**November 1968**

Dappled sunlight slid through Crowley’s bedroom window as he drifted awake. He’d been dreaming of something he couldn’t quite remember, somewhere green and tranquil; a vast garden. He’d fallen asleep reading a paperback copy of _The Left Hand of Darkness_ and as he rolled over its spine jabbed him in the face. He wanted to go back into the dream, into that verdant place, but instead he found himself staring at the pattern of light and dark on his wall. 

The pub’s disastrous numbers weren’t getting any better, no matter how many times he went through the columns. Not enough profits, too many bills. And an unstamped letter had turned up that week, detailing in angry, scratchy handwriting exactly how much Crowley owed and what would happen if he didn’t cough up. 

He’d already sold the old man’s car, the only things he had left that might be worth anything were the box of watches and the Viper. And the pub itself, of course.

He forced his feet out of bed and onto the cold tiles of the bathroom floor, drank too much coffee while he went through his father’s watches, laying them out one by one on the Formica tabletop. The old man hadn’t been much good as a father, or much good as a publican, or as anything else really. But he’d had a thing for watches, and Crowley hoped there might be one or two in the box worth something. A few of them worked, but most of them were still and silent. A boxful of spent time, he thought, lifting one of the ones that still ticked to his ear to hear the quiet ticking. 

Looking at the watches didn’t help—it wasn’t as if he knew anything about them. The best thing to do would be to take the whole box to the hock shop in Oxford and see what he’d get for the lot. And it looked like a good day for a ride. He could even see if the cinema was playing anything, maybe go to one of the clothing stores on the high street that had nicer clothes than the old lady blouses and tweed skirts the one shop in Tadfield sold. 

He took one aside, a square-faced Omega with a black band that he liked the look of, and one of the few that still ticked. He set the time, strapped it to his wrist, and then packed the rest back in the box. 

* * *

Oxford was three hours away by car but two hours for Crowley on his bike. He’d got 200 quid for the watches, which wasn’t enough; he’d decided against spending money he couldn’t justify on clothes. There’d been nothing on at the movies, and it was too early to go to a bar. So he rode back the long way, easing the bike past 60 mph once he was clear of houses and other traffic, opening the throttle as wide as it would go, leaning into the curves as the road unspooled before him. The wind was cold enough that he’d lost feeling in his fingers and his nose, and even through his leathers he felt it biting into his chest. Overhead, the deep blue sky of late autumn stretched cloudless and endless. Naked poplars cast long shadows over the asphalt and the sun glowed without warmth.

The Viper was the closest he ever got to outrunning himself; watching the speedometer twitch over 80, there were moments when he didn’t seem to be there at all. He was just the sound of the wheels on the road and the engine rumbling and the hedges whipping past. The world became nothing but blur and sensation and speed. Motion, velocity, instinct. He imagined sometimes if he went fast enough he might, like Newton’s cannonball, miss the Earth completely. But gravity always won.

He liked to take the corners without slowing and this time it was almost a disaster—there on the road ahead stood a figure, arms waving wildly, and he was going too fast and he was going to hit him—he swerved and for a moment the bike tilted too far and he was going to crash, except he steered into it and came to a lurching, too-fast, gravel-kicking halt a few feet from where the man stood.

Crowley lurched from the bike and kicked down the stand and whirled on the man.

“Fucking hell mate—”

“I’m so sorry!” The man’s face was a blur of worry as he approached. “The car—it just stopped—and my wife! Help me, please!”

Crowley saw the car then, on the shoulder of the road, the bonnet up, doors flung open. 

“She’s having a baby!” the man yelled, wildly. “The midwife said we had to call when it all started, and that she’d come, but we called and there wasn’t any answer and it’s happening too quickly!”

The road felt like it was vibrating under Crowley’s feet and his ears still rushed with the sound of the wind. “Ok, let me have a look at your car and I’ll—”

“It’s the timing belt, we can’t fix it, please can you go to town and get help?”

A sound ripped through the air and it took a moment for Crowley to recognise it as a yell. The man darted back to the car. Crowley found himself following, and got a glimpse of a dark-haired woman in the back seat of the car, half curled over the curve of her own belly. 

“Leslie,” she sobbed out.

“Maud, hold on for a little bit longer, this gentleman’s going to get help,” the man said, his voice very calm as he reached into the car to take her hand. “Aren’t you?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m getting help, don’t freak out,” Crowley agreed, stepping back. Bloody hell. “What’s your name?”

“Leslie Jenkins... and Maud, my wife is Maud.” Crowley thought he might recognise him, but then again just about everyone passed through the pub at some point. The woman let out another gasping cry, an awful sound that Crowley felt in his own guts. “It hurts!”

“Please hurry,” the man said, pleading. 

Crowley turned back to his bike, and the men yelled out again. “Tell them the contractions are speeding up!”

 _Contractions speeding up,_ Crowley thought, _what the fuck did that mean,_ but he nodded. Kickstarted his bike back to life; opened the throttle and shifted up gears as fast as he could. The joy of the ride had turned into the thrum of panic, the memory of the woman’s face contorted in pain. He felt a stab of self-pity too. All he’d wanted was a chance to ride his bike in the glassy sunlight before another week of pouring beers until his wrists ached, of endless dishwashing, of listening to Shadwell rant and rave about witchcraft and John F Kennedy, before another week of counting every last penny in the till and still coming up short. 

He was in town in ten minutes and inside the doctor’s surgery in just a handful more. He’d never actually been inside the building before, a gleaming white eyesore on the end of the High Street. The other Doctor East had built it a few years ago.

He strode into the waiting room. A gaggle of old ladies stared up at him as if he was on fire, and the receptionist stood as he approached her desk, yanking his helmet and glasses off.

“I was just on Owens road and there’s a woman stuck in a broken down car, and she’s having a baby, and she needs help now,” he barked. 

The receptionist blinked at him, and Crowley opened his mouth to tell her again, but behind him came a pleasant, calm voice.

“Miss Uriel, you should put a call into the ambulance service immediately. Mr Crowley, how far away is the car?” Doctor East stood in the doorway to another room. He wore a white coat, a stethoscope slung around his neck. Like a real doctor, Crowley thought, daftly. His voice was reassuring and steady and mild. 

“About fifteen miles,” Crowley replied.

The receptionist lifted the phone on her desk and dialled—apparently perfectly happy moving at glacial speed, Crowley thought, willing her to go faster—then spoke down the line for a few moments before relaying the details Crowley gave her about the car’s exact location. Crowley felt rather than saw the doctor come closer to stand beside him.

The receptionist hung up. “They said they’d be about an hour.” 

“I don’t know anything about babies,” Crowley said, looking from her face to the doctor’s, “but that’s too long. The woman said it was happening fast. Too fast.”

The doctor considered this, a line drawing between his brows. “Miss Uriel, do you know where Doctor East is?” 

“He’s on house calls until at least 6pm,” the receptionist replied. Crowley wanted to reach over and shake both of them. “You can’t just let the poor woman have a baby in a car by the side of a road!”

The doctor nodded, frowning, hands flexing against each other. “We should put a call into the midwife, Miss Uriel, if you’d please.”

The receptionist flicked open the rolodex by her side, rifled through, then placed the call.

Crowley pushed back his hair, trying not to growl in frustration. He thought of the woman’s face, of Leslie’s terrified expression. “I could take you. On my bike. We’ll get there in ten minutes.”

“Your motorcycle?” The doctor said, faintly, his hands stopping their worrying motion, his expression creasing into horror. 

“Yeah, my bike.”

“I don’t think so—“

“Speeding! That’s what he said... the contractions are speeding up,” Crowley struck his hand against the desk, and both the receptionist and the doctor flinched. “She needs help!” 

“No answer from the midwife, Doctor,” the receptionist said, eyes darting between them. 

“Ah. I see we have no choice. Miss Uriel, please cancel the rest of my appointments, I’ll be going with Mr Crowley to attend the birth.”

The receptionist waved the remaining patients outside and the doctor disappeared into the back rooms. A few minutes later he returned with his big brown bag, and Crowley watched with jiggling impatience as he pulled on a beige coat from the rack beside the door and carefully buttoned it up, and then with the same fastidious care draped a tartan scarf around his neck. 

“Here.” Crowley held out his helmet. “You should wear this too.”

The doctor looked down at the helmet and frowned yet again, but took it in the hand that wasn’t clutching his bag. “Right, yes. Well then.”

An awkward moment passed between them, almost awkward enough that Crowley felt like saying _forget it, none of this is my problem, I’ll let Leslie bloody Jenkins wet the baby’s head for free whenever he bloody well wants if I don’t have to do this._

But he remembered the woman’s pained groans, the man’s panicked face. _Too fast._

He took the helmet back and stepped into the doctor’s orbit, pulled it down onto the man’s pale head. He carefully threaded the black strap through the rings without touching the other man’s skin. 

They stood so close in that moment he could see the faint hint of stubble on his jaw, the softness under it. He remembered the night when he knocked on the man’s door and how their positions had been reversed, the doctor had been the one with his hands up, that clear gaze, somewhere between blue and green, darting towards his face and away. 

He had that feeling again, the one he’d had at the pub, and again when the man had appeared in his kitchen only a week ago, a sense of something arcing between them. Recognition, he wanted to say, although he’d been wrong about that in the past, even copped a black eye out of it once. But if he’d been a gambler, he’d have put ten quid on the doctor being, as Agnes might say, _bent,_ as bent as Crowley was. _Omi-palone,_ as the men in the city said to each other on a Saturday night in the Queen’s Head on Tryon street. But while Crowley might be bent, he wasn’t a gambler and he wasn’t an idiot either, and this wasn’t London, and he needed to keep that part of himself locked away.

_He’s still lovely._

He pulled the chinstrap tight. “There you go.” Behind the desk, he heard the receptionist make a slight sound that might have been a laugh, but he didn’t dignify her by turning around. “Come on then.”

Outside the sun touched the horizon and the doctor halted, bag clutched to his chest, as Crowley gestured to the bike. “I’ve never been on a motorbike before,” he said. “What do I do?”

“Not much. You’ll need to hold on to me as there’s no sissy bar,” Crowley said, and pulled his sunglasses back on before straddling the bike. “Just put your hands around my waist and don’t let go. And don’t lean away when I corner. And keep your feet up here. Don’t put them down, or you’ll lose some toes.”

The look on the doctor’s face might have been amusing under other circumstances, as he considered the bike as if it were an actual viper. “Is this... completely safe?” 

“Safe as houses,” Crowley said. _Don’t back out now, you bastard._

He started the bike—she always started, every time—steadied it, and then nodded at the doctor, who looked as if he might be about to change his mind. Then he swung himself onto the seat behind Crowley, and one of his hands gripped at Crowley’s hip. The big brown bag came to rest between them, awkwardly, and his other hand wound around Crowley’s waist, his fingers gripping tight enough that Crowley could feel it even through his leathers. 

_Don’t think about his hands._

He opened the throttle once more and the bike growled to life beneath them, lurched forward, and the doctor’s whole body tightened behind him, the inside his thighs pressing into the outside of Crowley’s own legs, his fingers digging into Crowley’s sides.

_Don’t think about anything._

The ride back took more like fifteen minutes; Crowley slowed for the corners more than usual, didn’t lean into them so much his knee touched the asphalt as he usually would. Didn’t want to scare the poor bugger, he told himself. Maybe he’d want to go for a ride another time. Maybe Crowley could offer, casual as you like. 

_Don’t think like that._

They rounded the last bend and Crowley slowed sedately this time before he pulled up. The doctor was off the bike almost before Crowley had his feet down. He pulled the helmet off as if it had personally done him some great wrong, and thrust it at Crowley his face white, his lips pressed together. 

“That was… terrifying!” He snapped. And then he turned, and it was as if some switch was flipped, he was The Doctor again, the calm presence from the office, and from the night of Crowley’s stitches. Steady, and sure of himself, standing straighter, whatever he’d just been feeling shoved away. The only giveaway was his hair, which had flattened into damp whorls on his head in some places and absurd tufts in others. Crowley resisted the urge to reach out and straighten it for him.

Leslie was at his side instantly, drawing him to the car, and the woman was still gasping into the last of the dying sunlight. Crowley had the idea he should stay back, so he stood by his bike and tried not to listen. 

“Mrs Jenkins, is this your first baby? It is! What a dramatic entrance. Let’s take a look at you then,” he heard the doctor say. From the corner of his eye he saw the man stand back from the car, shed his jacket and his scarf and fold them neatly onto the boot. 

“What should I do?” Leslie asked.

If Crowley was a different sort of person he might have offered some comfort or kindness. But he’d never been much good at that sort of thing. He met the man’s eye briefly over the car, and they both stared at each other helplessly before the doctor spoke.

“There’s nothing you can do, Mr Jenkins, beyond keeping out of the way and staying calm,” the doctor said. He fished something out of his bag. Close fitting white rubber gloves the same as he’d worn the night Crowley had gone to his house. 

“Now Mrs Jenkins I just need to do an exam here… oh I can feel the baby’s head already, you’re doing wonderfully—“ Crowley heard, and he thought maybe he should be further away, but there wasn’t anywhere to go that wasn’t road or over the low stone wall into the paddock. 

He didn’t get a chance to consider it further, because the doctor called out to him. “Mr Crowley! I need your help.” In the twilight his hair looked whiter than ever. “There’s a small torch in my bag. I need you to hold it for me, so I can see what’s happening.”

Crowley thought about arguing, thought about pointing out that the baby’s bloody father was right there, but his feet carried him forward anyway. He tried to not look in the back seat as much as he could but there was no avoiding it as he stepped in close enough to the doctor to reach into his bag. He couldn’t miss seeing the woman’s pale and sweat-streaked face, her eyes wide, or the dark stains on her dress. She moaned long and low now, catching panting breaths in between. 

“I’m sorry,” the doctor continued, in a lower voice. “I’d rather not involve you but I need my hands free. And I think it’s for the best if the father stays out there.”

“Sorright,” Crowley muttered, even though it wasn’t. He found the torch, switched it on, and immediately regretted being able to see in that much better detail exactly what was happening.

“And stand to one side if you will, we need to give Mrs Jenkins as much privacy as we can. A little higher with the light please. Ah, that’s perfect.”

Crowley did as he was told, trying to keep his eyes away from the poor woman.

“Is everything all right, doctor?” Leslie called in a dazed voice. 

“Tickety boo, Mr Jenkins,” the doctor replied, and Crowley risked a look at his face. He was frowning again, two deep furrows between his eyes; whether from concern or concentration Crowley couldn’t tell. “Hold that light steady, Mr Crowley.”

Crowley looked away again as the doctor leaned back in. 

“Mrs Jenkins, I can see the head now, and it’s time for a big push. Can you do that for me?”

The woman made a low moaning sound that could have been a yes, and then groaned again, louder this time.

Crowley cast his gaze up into the sky. The first stars were coming out; Venus bright and low to the west. This was all far too real, and he wished he’d ridden home a different way, wished he’d chosen a different day to take the box of watches to Oxford, wished maybe he’d never come to this horrible quaint little village. Too late for that though, wasn’t it. Time moved stubbornly, implacably in only one direction.

The woman gave another moan that sounded like she was being ripped apart. 

“That’s it Mrs Jenkins! You’re doing wonderfully! Give me another big push!” 

She groaned again, and Crowley made the mistake of glancing down to see what was undeniably a head, slimy and wet and dark, before he slammed his eyes shut. 

“The shoulders now Mrs Jenkins, you’re doing brilliantly,” the doctor said, soothingly. “I’m just going to help your baby’s shoulders out now.” Crowley heard the doctor take a shaky breath, and then suddenly that there was a series of wet sounds that made Crowley wish he could shut his ears as easily as his eyes.

“Mr Crowley—in my bag, there’s a suction bulb,” the doctor said then and he opened his eyes to see the doctor holding something small and wet and wrinkled—a baby. He was knuckling at the baby’s tiny chest, and staring down at it with concentration, the frown line back between his brows.

Crowley looked in the bag and fished it out, and passed it over, and watched as the doctor carefully suctioned the baby’s tiny nose and mouth. And then the baby made a tiny noise that sounded more like a kitten mewling than anything human, and the woman let out a sob. “Is the baby all right, doctor?”

“She is, she’s just perfect,” the doctor replied. “Well done, little one, you’re breathing on your own. Now Mrs Jenkins we just need to cut the cord… Mr Crowley, I need two more things from my bag. Two small clamps that look rather like letter As, in a sterile package, and some scissors—”

Crowley did as he was asked, found the clamps and the scissors, held the light steady and watched in fascination as the doctor carefully laid the baby on the seat and then applied the clamps to its umbilical cord. He took the scissors out and cut the cord, which took more effort than Crowley would have expected. 

“My scarf, Mr Crowley,” the doctor said, lifting the baby up again.

“Your scarf?” he repeated, stupidly, staring at the tiny thing in his arms. 

“On the boot, we mustn’t let the baby get cold,” the doctor said, then louder, “congratulations Mrs Jenkins. Your daughter is perfect.”

He smiled, that same smile he’d bestowed on Crowley a handful of times, only this time he turned the force of it on the mewling pink thing in his arms. 

_The scarf, the boot, yes ok._ Crowley grabbed for it, trying to keep the light angled down, passed it to the doctor, and watched as he wrapped it around the baby. An actual fucking baby, where moments ago there’d just been a woman groaning and heaving.

The doctor passed the now-crying bundle to her mother, then leaned over the woman again. “The placenta now,” he said in that same calm, reassuring voice. “A little more light, Mr Crowley. Thank you. And well done on helping deliver a baby.”

He did as he was told, and this time it was easier not to watch, easier to turn his eyes towards where Mr Jenkins stood in the twilight, or to look at where Mrs Jenkins cradled the tiny tartan-wrapped infant as though she was holding something made of glass. The baby was wailing now, a thin high note, and in the distance blackbirds wheeled against the darkening sky above the stubbled November fields. A baby. A fucking baby, out here in the dark, under the awakening stars. He’d helped deliver this poor bloody woman’s baby. Well, he’d held the light while the woman had done the work, but he felt lifted by it anyway. Here was a new human wailing into the night for the first time, a heart beating like the ticking of a watch.

In the distance, he heard a siren. 

A few moments later the ambulance arrived, and there was a flurry of activity, and Crowley found himself redundant now. So he leaned against the low stone wall and tried to keep out of the way, wishing for a cigarette, but he’d smoked the last of his pack in Oxford. He watched as the nurses or medics or whatever they were helped the woman out of the car, onto a stretcher and loaded her and the baby into the back of the ambulance. The Doctor told them there’d been tearing, and some bleeding, but that otherwise the mother was doing well. 

“Thank you doctor,” Mr Jenkins said as he clambered into the back of the vehicle. “You’re an angel.”

After that man and the woman and their tiny infant were whisked off into the night, and Crowley and the doctor were alone as the lights faded into the darkness. 

Crowley turned to the other man, his face a pale blur against the star-flecked night. “Lift home?”

* * *

Riding in the dark was different, the only light the last gleam of twilight in the sky and the flashing of the headlight on the trees and low stone walls by the side of the road. Crowley took the corners much more slowly—he wasn’t a complete maniac—but the doctor held on as tightly as he had on the way there. Tighter even, though that might have been wishful thinking. 

He liked it. He liked the way their bodies touched at discrete points, leg to leg and hands to waist, and he thought he’d like it even more if the doctor would touch more of him. But there was going to be a bloody problem if he kept those thoughts up, so he just looked at the road ahead.

They were back in town in too short a time, and it was cold, and even through his leathers he felt frozen through by the time he turned the bike down the lane to his backyard so he couldn’t imagine the doctor wasn’t also bloody freezing. This time, though, when he stopped the bike by his back fence and turned the key, the doctor held onto him for a couple of seconds.

“You all right back there?” Crowley said, over his shoulder. 

“Ah yes, I am. I… well, I should say thank you.” The doctor let go then, slid off the bike. The lights were on in the Young’s house, casting the doctor’s face in a warm yellow glow, and even in the dim light Crowley could see his cheeks were reddened from the cold. 

“Better not, might go to my head,” Crowley replied. And then, against his better judgment, against his own careful rules, he added, “do you want to come in for a whiskey? Or some wine? Get warmed up?”

“I ah…” the doctor paused, looked away, and Crowley was sure he was going to say no. But then he seemed to change his mind, and gave an almost smile. “I just need to get changed first. I’m rather a mess. In ten minutes?”

“Right yeah, course. That’ll give me a chance to get out of the leather. So. Well… just… knock on the door yeah.”

“I shall. See you in a tick.”

He tried not to rush inside, instead tried to walk calmly to his back door, not watching the doctor do exactly the same. As soon as he got inside, though, he stumbled upstairs to yank off his leathers and change as quickly as he could from his warm but old jersey into something else. A black turtleneck, which was fine, and black velvet trousers, which were all wrong, too fussy, too Sunday best, and he pulled them off again and replaced them with jeans. He risked a quick journey to the bathroom to fuss hopelessly at his helmet-crushed hair, and the look on his own face gave him pause.

 _Pull yourself together, you’re in a bloody state,_ he told his reflection. _Just a neighbour popping over for a drink after a spectacularly strange day. That’s all._

_But it might not be._

His hair flopped hopelessly and he ran his fingers through it a few times before giving up and going back downstairs. The living room wasn’t messy, but he straightened a stack of magazines on the coffee table the tiniest fraction. He took whiskey and a bottle of red wine, just in case, and set them next to the record player, beside the dark blue globe he’d got for ten quid at the borough markets before he’d come to Tadfield. 

The doctor seemed like the sort who’d like bloody Glen Campbell or Peter, Paul and Mary; the best he could do was Bob Dylan, and he’d just lowered the needle into the groove of _Blonde on Blonde_ when the knock came on the door. 

A brief scene as though from a movie played in his head—he would open the door and the doctor would step in and then one or the other of them would move and they’d be kissing, as inevitable as sunset or a car crash, as inevitable as the ripples in water from a falling stone.

He opened the door, and the doctor hovered in the doorway, and neither of them moved. 

“Whiskey? Wine?” Crowley said, before the silence could thicken and curdle.

“Actually,” the doctor said, twisting at the ring on his finger. “I have an early start tomorrow, and I… I really shouldn’t. I just thought I should let you know.”

The scene in Crowley’s mind came to an abrupt ending, but he forced himself to give half a shrug and put a grin on. “Yeah I get it. Some other time maybe.”

“Yes, yes, some other time,” the doctor said, his gaze anywhere but at Crowley’s face, but he still didn’t move. “And… I also wanted to say thank you. For today.”

“You did all the work,” Crowley replied. “You were amazing.”

The doctor’s mouth opened and then shut again. “I did my job. The mother was the one who did it all.”

“Dunno about that, it looked like you did plenty from where I was standing.”

The doctor’s face went through a series of tiny expressions, until he was frowning again. “I do feel rather foolish that I required so much your assistance however—well, I do need a vehicle, obviously, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to deal with it. And they’re not really my forte, cars and things. Anyway. I should—”

“I can help you there,” Crowley interrupted, before he could walk away. “Know a bit about cars. You don’t want to go to that bastard who runs the lot in town, he’ll charge you an arm and a leg. We can go to Oxford, you’ll get a better deal.”

The doctor paused again, and this time he looked at Crowley’s face, and a small, almost secretive smile crossed his face. “On your motorbike? My dear boy, that thing is a deathtrap.”

“Are you dead? No? See? it’s perfectly safe. I told you that.”

“I feel riding on it is rather akin to playing Russian Roulette with five bullets.”

“Some thanks that is for my heroic efforts today. And the Viper’s too. I won’t tell her you said that.”

“I am most grateful to the both of you, I just wish never to sit on the back of the infernal machine ever again.”

“Well, I’ll borrow Agnes’s car, if you’re going to be like that. Take you to Oxford in the chariot you deserve.” This felt easy, and natural, and right, and Crowley took a step back into his hallway. “Sure I can’t change your mind about that drink? I’ve got a nice bottle of Talisker back here, or some fancy French stuff I couldn’t give away at the pub.”

Whatever it was, the doctor’s shutters seemed to come down again, and he too stepped back, further out of the house. “I’m afraid not. I really must be getting on. Thank you again, Mr Crowley.”

“No-one calls me Mr Crowley, Doctor East. Just Crowley.”

“Do you even have a first name?” 

“I do, but only my nan uses it. So Crowley is fine.”

“Well then. I’ll be just Aziraphale, then. Good night, Crowley.”

“Good night, Aziraphale.”

They exchanged another look and then the doctor—Aziraphale—turned and was halfway down the path before he turned back. “I’m free next Wednesday,” he called. “To go to Oxford. If the offer stands.”

“Yeah. Wednesday. Perfect.”

Crowley shut the door and went back into the living room, poured one glass of whiskey, straightened the magazines again, stalked from one side of the room to the other, sent the globe beside the record player spinning, and paced back again. 

_Not even one full rotation of the earth around the sun later and he would shut that same door on Aziraphale again, or perhaps it would be the ghost of Aziraphale, and pace the length of his room in a restlessly elliptical path. How could he set the world spinning backwards, how could he wind back sunrises and sunrises, undo time’s relentless forward motion? He would drink too much whiskey, and he would replay every conversation in his mind, and somewhere in space, men would hurtle towards the moon. He would finally take the globe and throw it into the dinky little fireplace, and it would fall with a disappointing clang, a little dented, paint chipped, but otherwise unharmed. And then he’d smash his glass in beside it, and then the whiskey bottle itself, and then he’d rip all the magazines and throw them in and set a match into the lot of them, and the globe would char and smoke but not burn, and the world itself would keep on moving mercilessly._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s notes: I did an absurd amount of research into how giving birth would have worked in the 1960s but I’ve still taken some liberties with it for dramatic effect, so please forgive me. All errors are my own, and do not at all reflect the fantastic medical advice I had on this chapter. Thank you again to Princip1914 for setting me straight and I hope it’s not too glaringly wrong.  
> The book Crowley is reading is _The Left Hand of Darkness_ by Ursula Le Guin, one of my favourite authors. I think Crowley would have loved it. It actually didn’t come out until 1969, but again forgive me for taking liberties. (Cough Bastille cough.)  
> Crowley’s motorbike is a [Velocette Viper,](https://classic-motorbikes.net/classic-bike-images/velocette-classic-motorcycles/velocette-viper/) which was a cafe racer style bike made in the UK in the 1950s and 60s. Very sleek and black and speedy.  
> Omi-palone is a Polari term that meant a a gay man. If you don’t know much about Polari I recommend The Allusionist podcast episode 99 as a fantastic introduction.  
> A few people have asked me about the use of miles in this story instead of kilometres, and if anyone cares, it’s because the UK switched to metric in 1965, but after so long with one system the changeover was slow.  
> And finally... this chapter is dedicated to the memory of RBG, and her vote in the Oberfegell v. Hodges civil rights case.


End file.
